The Philosophy of Teleospiritism

In this long document I will attempt the difficult job of introducing a new philosophy. Such a task is rather as risky as a person walking across a very long city block in winter, after its sidewalk has been covered with ice. But I have a strategy that I think may help me from slipping too many times. I have a large set of observations and facts that I have gathered over quite a few years. Like a man with a large bag of ice melting particles who throws such particles in front of himself as he slowly walks along a long icy sidewalk, I will be continually presenting such observations and facts as I proceed along the difficult philosophical path I will walk. Hopefully this will prevent me from slipping and falling to the ground too many times as I traverse this long hazardous path. 

I will call the philosophy I propose teleospiritism. Although having a few similarities with Allan Kardec's philosophy of spiritism established in the nineteenth century, teleospiritism is a separate philosophy that should not be considered an offshoot or version of Kardec's philosophy. 

Teleospiritism is not based on mere armchair arguments, but on a very close study of some very important observational realities. The diagram below helps to clarify some of the observational realities on which teleospiritism is based. 

I will follow this approach in describing teleospiritism:

(1) First I will discuss what I call the "lower foundation" of teleospiritism, which is an approach of critically analyzing the dogmas of academia.

(2) Next I will discuss one-by-one each of the observational pillars of teleospiritism, what I call the Six Main Clues About Reality. Those pillars are shown in the diagram above. The words written on such pillars are concise statements of these Six Main Clues About Reality, which are stated more fully in the section titles below.  Such concise statements appear in the diagram so that legible text can fit within such a diagram. 

(3) Lastly I will discuss how these observational pillars lead to a particular philosophy I call teleospiritism, a philosophy that includes doctrines such as the doctrine of the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force (GOAL), and the doctrine that mind and memory must be primarily spirit realities rather than brain realities. 

(Note: If by chance you are reading this document on www.archive.org rather than on one of my blog sites, and you wish to follow the URL links, I suggest you use the link at the right of the www.archive.org page allowing you to download a PDF version of this document; for you will then be able to use URL links in such a PDF version.)

The Lower Foundation of Teleospiritism: Critical Analysis of Academia Dogmas

Teleospiritism has as one of its main underpinnings a critical analysis of the claims of academia and its professors. A teleospiritist has no naive slogan of "believe exactly as the scientists believe." Instead, he or she attempts to ponder which claims of scientists are well-established by observations, and which claims are not well-established by observations, but are claims that may be mere speech customs or belief dogmas of academia belief communities.  Part of such analysis is to view the output of today's professors in a strongly sociological light.  

Scientists like to promote an extremely naive and simplistic narrative of why scientists say the things they say. According to this naive narrative, scientists simply "discover truth" through their experiments and observations, and then they teach us such "discovered truths" when they teach their classes and write their papers and write their books. The cultural reality is something vastly more complicated and nuanced than so simple a narrative, because of factors such as these:

(1) When they go through the long process of becoming PhD's and professors, scientists are culturally conditioned to become members of particular scientist belief communities. Such belief communities typically assert many facts that are well-established by observations, as well as many assumptions and dogmas that are not well-established by observations. Once a scientist enters such a scientist belief community, he is under the spell of the behavior traditions, ideology, speech customs, rituals, taboos and belief traditions of a particular conformist culture. Trying very hard to conform to such a culture, a scientist may end up making claims or making assumptions that are not well-established by observations. Such claims and assumptions may actually be in conflict with observations.

(2)  Rather than being impartial judges of truth, today's scientists are very much vested interests with very high economic motivations to speak and write in some way that will allow them to progress along some scientist career path that will be financially successful. Economic motivations and financial influences and corporate entanglements are everywhere in the career path of the modern scientist, particularly scientists such as neuroscientists who tend to be strongly entangled with the pharmaceutical industry and manufacturers of medical equipment. For example:

• To get his PhD, a scientist must choose a research thesis and write some PhD dissertation that he thinks will be approved by his superiors so that they will grant him his PhD. 
• To get a job as a professor, or to get a position as a tenured professor, a scientist who recently got a PhD must typically pass the majority vote of some group of professors, which he will be unlikely to pass if he has defied the speech customs and belief traditions of such professors.
• To get the all-important grant money from funding institutions, the scientist will usually need to propose research that makes assumptions compatible with prevailing assumptions in his research specialty.
• To get his scientific papers published, the scientist will usually need to make claims in his papers compatible with prevailing assumptions in his research specialty, so that the paper can pass a peer review.  

Because of factors such as these, the claims of professors must be subject to very careful scrutiny, without taking anything for granted. The need for this becomes all the more clear when you consider that there is a strong resemblance between the tendencies of scientists and clergy. The diagram below illustrates the point:

See my post here ("Scientists and Clergy Have Much in Common") for a long discussion explaining why there is a very large resemblance between the belief communities of scientists and those of the clergy, the officials of organized religion. The diagram below illustrates some of the problems in academia that can lead to erroneous ideas among scientists and the public. One of those problems is overconfidence involving smug legends of achievement that do not hold up well to critical scrutiny, such as the legend that biological origins were explained by a nineteenth century author (Darwin) who knew very little or nothing about the oceanic depths of biological complexity we now know about. Another gigantic problem is the ignoring of important evidence that does not fit in with the belief traditions prevailing in academia (illustrated by the red "no entry" signs we see in the diagram). 

We should not tend to believe some doctrine merely because it is allegedly the consensus of some community of experts. For one thing, the very word "consensus" is currently one of the most abused words in the English language. The word "consensus" is sometimes defined to mean unanimity of opinion, and other times defined to mean a mere majority opinion. So the word "consensus" is a treacherous and ambiguous one, a word apt to confuse and mislead. The person claiming some "consensus" of scientific opinion will typically be trying to create the impression of a unanimity of opinion, one that actually very rarely exists. On almost all controversial issues, we lack any solid evidence that there exists any real consensus of opinion among scientists (in the sense of unanimity), and part of the reason is that scientists are very bad about effectively measuring what they think on disputed matters. The only reliable way to measure the opinions of scientists is to do secret ballot opinion polls, but such polls are almost never done. Very many of the main claims of scientific consensus are unfounded, and are cases in which there is significant disagreement. 

Moreover, we know that majorities of expert opinion have often been not merely wrong, but wrong in a very disastrous way. I discuss quite a few such cases in my post "Disastrous Blunders of the Experts." A majority of expert opinion helped cause such disasters as the filling of the world with hydrogen bombs, the death of more than 100,000 from atomic testing, the Vietnam War causing an unnecessary loss of more than a million lives, the unnecessary Iraq War causing so many hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the Opioid Epidemic involving the death of more than 300,000 Americans, the bungled response to COVID-19 that played a large part in the death of more than a million Americans, and the Bay of Pigs invasion leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis putting mankind's survival at risk.  

Do the problems above mean that we should simply reject science? Not at all. In fact, all of the observational pillars of teleospiritism I discuss below are very much pillars that arise from the work of scientists themselves. Scientific observations are actually the main linchpins of the philosophy I will propose.  But the output of scientists must be subject to critical scrutiny, just as we subject to critical scrutiny the output of other professionals such as politicians, engineers and doctors. One rule to follow is "trust nothing on human authority alone, and weigh carefully all observational claims."  Another rule to follow is "don't believe anything merely because it is claimed that most scientists believe it." 

Having discussed some of the spirit of critical analysis that forms a lower foundation for the philosophy of teleospiritism, let me now discuss what I call the Six Main Clues About Reality. Each of these six things constitutes a kind of pillar that partially holds up the conclusions of the philosophy of teleospiritism.  

The First Main Clue About Reality: A Sudden Fine-Tuned Origin of the Universe

The fact that our universe seems to have suddenly originated is one of the most important facts that a human can learn, and also a fact with the utmost philosophical significance.  To understand the importance of this fact, we can consider what positions were taken before it was discovered that the universe suddenly originated. The principle philosophy of ancient materialism was a philosophy called atomism or Epicureanism.  There survives from antiquity one great literary work stating this philosophy, the famous work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. In that book Lucretius denied all claims of purposeful teleology in nature, and states the doctrine that the universe has always existed. Early in the work he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

Such a doctrine was very convenient for a materialist such as Lucretius. For one thing, it allowed him to deny that there was ever any purposeful creation event in which the universe began, something he did not want to believe it. Secondly, the doctrine allowed him to suggest a possible explanation for how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order.  The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms,  combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time.  Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura:

"So much can letters by mere change of order

Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms

Can effect more combinations, out of which 

All different kinds of things may be created."

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock principle of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences  ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation.

Believers in an eternal universe got a rude surprise in the twentieth century. Scientists discovered that our universe had a sudden beginning, seemingly about 13 billion years ago, in an event they called the Big Bang.  There were two types of observations that established this idea. The first were a great number of observations of galactic redshifts establishing that the entire universe was expanding.  The second type of observations were observations of what is called the cosmic background radiation. The scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation, made around 1965.  Since then fancy space satellites have observed this radiation in great detail. The cosmic background radiation is a type of radiation that was predicted before 1965 as a consequence of a universe that had a hot, dense beginning.  

The discovery of the Big Bang was a very great blow against all those who believe that human existence is accidental or that the universe is accidental. The rather unfortunate term "Big Bang" is somewhat misleading, because it causes some to imagine something like a giant bomb that exploded. The theory actually depicts no such thing, but something far more radical: the idea of all of the matter and energy in the universe arising from an infinitely small mathematical point. It is rather hard to imagine anything that could be more suggestive of a universe being purposefully created out of nothing.  

There are specific aspects of the Big Bang account of the universe's origin that suggest in the strongest terms the idea of teleology, the idea that our universe originated as the intentional action of a purposeful agent. They are specifically: (1) the nonexistence of an expected matter and antimatter balance that would have prevented living things from ever appearing, despite such a balance being predicted if the Big Bang had been a natural, purposeless event; (2) what seems like an enormous fine-tuning in the universe's initial expansion rate. 

Let me discuss item (1) above. Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons leads to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So the amount of antimatter should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. 

A universe with nothing but photons would be inhabitable. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would be either uninhabitable or at best barely habitable.  When only a tiny amount of matter comes in contact with antimatter, they are both converted to energy in a release far more destructive than a hydrogen bomb. Even if there were only small amounts of antimatter hanging around, the results would be devastating. A single person stepping on an antimatter pebble would release more energy than a hydrogen bomb. And if there were lots of antimatter in outer space, our planet would frequently get zapped by lethal rays arising from matter coming into contact with antimatter. 

Because of the almost total nonexistence of antimatter that should been been created as abundantly as matter in the Big Bang, the evidence for the Big Bang very strongly suggests the idea of a purposeful origin of the universe, in which things were very carefully controlled so that the expected ratio of matter and antimatter (a 1 to 1 ratio) would not occur (such a ratio being incompatible with a habitable universe).  There is another way in which the sudden origin of the universe very strongly suggests the idea of purpose and teleology: the fact that the universe's initial expansion rate must have been very carefully fine-tuned. 

Scientists figured out how fine-tuned the universe's expansion rate must have been around the time of the late 1970's.  They pondered two numbers: the universe's current density and a number they called the critical density, the density of matter needed for the universe's expansion to one day stop. They realized that these two numbers are very close to each other, and that the farther you go back in time, the more closely the numbers must have matched in order to end up with a universe such as we now have. Calculating all the way back to the beginning of the universe's expansion, they found that the universe's initial density must have matched the critical density to within 1 part in 10 to the thirtieth power.  Another way to explain this matching is to say that the universe's initial expansion rate must have been fine-tuned to about 1 part in 10 the thirtieth power (1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).  

Scientists should have just accepted this reality of very precise fine-tuning in the expansion rate of the universe at its beginning. But almost as soon as they noticed such a fine-tuning, scientists began twisting themselves into knots trying to evade such a reality. It was rather like some husband who comes home to find his wife naked in bed with some other man, also naked, and who begins creating some elaborate theory to explain why such a sight wasn't really evidence for his wife's adultery. Scientists came up with a wildly speculative theory called the "cosmic inflation theory" involving the idea of exponential expansion for an instant near the beginning of time, caused by a never-observed "inflaton field" having no basis in the Standard Model of Physics. For the past forty years scientists have been churning out endless versions of such a "cosmic inflation theory," none of which have been well-supported by observations. Such "cosmic inflation theories" themselves require a great deal of fine-tuning to work, with the total amount of fine-tuning required being equivalent to the fine-tuning you would need to have if there never was any such "cosmic inflation" or exponential expansion. 

The situation can be summarized as follows: to end up with a habitable universe like the universe we now live in, the universe must have begun in an incredibly special, improbable and fine-tuned state, regardless of whether the speculation of "cosmic inflation" involving exponential expansion is correct. 

What I have called here the First Main Clue About Reality gives us a strong reason for regarding our universe as having been purposefully created, but it need not force us into accepting any particular age for the universe. A very important point commonly overlooked is that because a created universe could presumably be created in any state of complexity or organization, we cannot have confidence in any estimate of the age of the universe once we have started to suspect that it was created. This point is explained in my post "If the Universe Was Created, Or if Everything Is Mental, Then We Do Not Know How Old the Universe Is."   

The Second Main Clue About Reality: The Vast Organization of Bodies

One of the most important clues one can consider when trying to figure out reality is the degree of very complex and coordinated organization in the bodies of human beings and other organisms. The bodies of humans and other large organisms are arrangements of matter more impressive than anything humans have ever constructed.  The degree of organization in human bodies is described in the table below:

HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS.	Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study.
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM.	The human skeletal system contains about 206 bones.
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES.	Examples of organ systems include the circulatory system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain.
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES.
TISSUE CONSISTS OF CELLS.	There are roughly 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization.
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OF ORGANELLES.	A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES.	There are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of protein molecules that work together to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex.
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE.	Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function.
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY.	Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed.
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS.	A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.

Modern biologists typically do a very poor job of explaining the degree of order, organization, complexity and information in living organisms, and they often act as if they were trying to conceal such realities from us.  I think this is partially because if they were to  describe such realities properly, people would be much less likely to accept the explanatory claims biologists typically make.

Let us consider protein molecules. The human genome specifies the amino acid sequence of more than 20,000 protein molecules. Each such protein molecule has a particular function in the body, and each such protein molecule is made up of many amino acids. The median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 375 amino acids. 

A very important point is that you will not get a functional protein molecule by some random combination of about 375 amino acids. To be functional, a protein molecule must have what are called folds. When the protein molecule has these folds, it can assume a three-dimensional shape that is necessary for its functionality.

For every possible protein molecule that has folding and has a useful function, there are countless trillions of quadrillions of physically possible protein molecules that do not fold and do have any useful function. Similarly, for every combination of 375 characters or letters that results in a functional computer subroutine, there are countless trillions of quadrillions of possible 375-character combinations that do not result in a functional computer subroutine. It can reasonably be estimated that for every functional protein molecule of about 300 amino acids, there are more than 10 to the two hundredth power possible combinations of 300 amino acids that would not result in a functional protein molecule.

This likelihood does not get any larger when we factor in so-called "natural selection" (a very misleading term because "selection" is a word meaning "choice," and so-called "natural selection" involves no choice). Small fractions of protein molecules are not functional, and provide no survival benefit and no “survival of the fittest” benefit. So so-called "natural selection" and survival of the fittest would never act to cause functional protein molecules to accumulate on the grounds of fractional parts being beneficial. Small fractions or halves of protein molecules are not beneficial, are not functional, and would not have the folds needed for proper function of protein molecules.

There is a way for us to visualize how unlikely it would be that a functional protein molecule would form by chance. Let us consider interstellar space. The space between stars is almost inconceivably vast. The star nearest to our sun is about 25 trillion miles away. That distance is about three billion times the diameter of the Earth.

Now, let's imagine a spaceship that was traveling around randomly, without any guidance. What is the chance that such a ship would by chance go into orbit around a planet orbiting the nearest star? Since we are dealing with three-dimensional space, the chance of such a thing would be much less than 1 in three billion.

The nearest star is about 4 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles away. If we imagine a cubic volume of space 4 light-years in width, we have a volume of about 10⁴⁰ cubic miles. Within this volume you could fit about 10³⁶ planet Earths, a trillion trillion trillion Earths.  If we imagine a cube 4 light-years wide, each of the six faces of that cube will have a width of about 25 trillion miles, but an area (width times height) of 25 trillion miles squared, which is roughly six hundred trillion trillion miles or 10²⁶ miles. The chance of a randomly traveling spaceship coming very close to a planetary target of about 10,000 miles located anywhere near any of the six faces of such a cube is much less than 1 chance in 10²⁰. 

So, very roughly speaking, an unguided spaceship sent out in a random direction from Earth would have something like 1 chance in 10²⁰ of going into orbit around a planet revolving around the nearest star. 

Vastly underestimating the unlikelihood of a functional protein molecule forming from random amino acid combinations, we can use such a likelihood as a very rough metaphor for the chance of a random sequence of about 375 amino acids being a functional protein. It is actually vastly more unlikely that hundreds of random amino acids would be a functional protein. There are twenty types of amino acids that can be specified in any single position of DNA or in any part of the polypeptide chain that is a protein molecule before it folds.   Considering a protein of only 100 amino acids, the total number of combinations of the twenty types of amino acids (for a length of 100 amino acids) is 20 to the hundredth power, which is equal to 10 to the one-hundred and thirtieth power, exactly 1.2676506 X 10¹³⁰. Virtually none of these would correspond to functional protein molecules. 

Now, in the human genome there is a specification of the amino acid sequences of more than 20,000 types of functional protein molecules. What metaphor can we use for the appearance of all of these functional protein molecules arising by chance? We can simply extend the metaphor I just used. Let us imagine an unguided spaceship without any crew and without any guidance system, randomly traveling about between the stars. Let us imagine that this unguided spaceship somehow goes into orbit around 20,000 different planets, again and again being so lucky as to reach a planet, even though no one and no system is guiding the spaceship. The chance of this happening can be very roughly calculated as being 1 in 10 multiplied by itself 400,000 times, in other words, roughly 1 in  10^400,000.  You get that probability by multiplying by itself  20,000 times the previously estimated 1 chance in 10²⁰ of accidentally going into orbit around a planet when traveling about four light-years in a random direction. 

But for us to accept the Darwinian story of biological origins, we must believe in something far more improbable than this. For the total number of types of functional folding protein molecules that exist in all species has been estimated to be between 10 billion and a trillion.  A paper says, "There are >1010 to 1012 different proteins in all organisms from the three domains of life (Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea) on Earth."  Each of these types of molecules is its own separate complex information-rich type of invention.   What would be a good metaphor for the unlikelihood of all of those types of proteins originating through unguided processes? The correct metaphor would seem to be an unguided spaceship traveling through the Milky Way galaxy, and accidentally going into orbit around 10 billion planets. The chance of this happening can be calculated as roughly 1 in 10 multiplied by itself 200,000,000,000 times, in other words, roughly 1 in 10^{200,000,000,000.} You get that probability by multiplying by itself 10 billion times the 1 chance in 10²⁰ of accidentally going into orbit around a planet when traveling in a random direction about four light-years. 

The Darwinian origin of the biosphere's proteins would be like this

There's another analogy we can use to get a rough idea of how improbable are the series of lucky accidents imagined by Darwinian orthodoxy. We can imagine human radio astronomers getting a long intelligent-sounding radio message that was produced not by intelligent agents, but purely by chance. 

There are natural factors that result in radio waves being transmitted from far in space. Such natural factors merely produce noise. But let us imagine our astronomers getting some radio signal that was pure noise, the result of mindless natural factors, but which somehow sounded perfectly intelligent. For example, suppose the radio waves spelled out the following:

"Greetings, residents of planet Earth! We are the denizens of a beautiful life-filled planet orbiting a star twenty light-years away from your planet. We have picked up radio signals sent from your planet. We know all about your beautiful blue-green planet, the third planet in your solar system. You will be happy to learn that you are not alone in the universe. Our planet is the fifth planet in our solar system. Our planet is drier than yours, but one fifth of it is covered by water. Our gravity is lower than on your planet, and we have built towers far taller than any on your planet. Please continue listening on this radio frequency, and you will learn all about our wonderful culture, and the great progress we have made in science and technology." 

Now imagine, someone asked us to believe that this message was not actually the result of any intelligent beings, but was purely the chance product of radio signals produced by random natural processes. Imagine if someone asked you to believe that such a message was purely the accidental result of random radio blips that had against all odds closely resembled a functional message. That would be like the chance of any type of functional protein molecule arising for the first time by chance.  Since there are twenty amino acid types which can be specified in each of the vast number of  nucleotide positions of a DNA molecule,  and twenty-six characters in the English alphabet, the chance of a functional protein from a random combination of about 370 amino acids is roughly comparable to the chance of 370 random characters making a readable functional paragraph. 

Continuing the same analogy, what would be the chance of you getting the 10 billion or more types of protein molecules in the earthly biosphere, by unguided processes? It would be like the chance of a very large public library of many thousands of readable and informative books having been produced by typing monkeys rather than intelligent authors.

There is no Darwinian way out of such difficulties.  The problem is that functional protein molecules cannot arise by any "each little part adds a benefit" fashion imagined by Darwinists.  Experiments with protein molecules show that changing only a small fraction of their amino acids causes them to be non-functional. 

For example, the paper here estimates that making a random change in a single amino acid of a protein (most of which have hundreds of amino acids) will have a 34% chance of leading to a protein's "functional inactivation." Figure 1 of the paper here suggests something similar, by indicating that after about 10 random mutations (a change in only 10 of its hundreds of amino acids), the fitness of a protein molecule will drop to zero. Further evidence for such claims can be found in this paper, which discusses very many ways in which a random mutation in a gene for a protein molecule can destroy or damage the function or stability of the protein.  An "active site" of an enzyme protein is a region of the protein molecule (about 10% to 20% of the volume of the molecule) which binds and undergoes a chemical reaction with some other molecule.  The paper states, "If a mutation occurs in an active site, then it should be considered lethal since such substitution will affect critical components of the biological reaction, which, in turn, will alter the normal protein function." The paper follows that sentence with a mention of quite a few other ways in which random mutations can break protein molecules, making them nonfunctional. For example, we read that "an amino acid substitution at a critical folding position can prevent the forming of the folding nucleus, which makes the remainder of the structure rapidly condense," which is a description of how a single amino acid change (less than a 1% change in the amino acids in a protein molecule) can cause a protein molecule to no longer have the 3D shape needed for its function. As a biology textbook tells us, "Proteins are fragile, are often only on the brink of stability."

Just as planets are very rare exceptions within interstellar space (with 99.99999999999999999999999999% of such space not being planets), functional protein molecules are very rare exceptions within the total volume of amino acid combinatorial space (the "possibility space"consisting of all the possible combinations of 1000 or fewer amino acids), with 99.99999999999999999999999999% of possible amino acid combinations not resulting in functional protein molecules.  Similarly, functional very complex computer subroutines are very rare in the totality of alphabetic combinatorial space (the "possibility space" consisting of all possible combinations of 1000 or fewer characters), with 99.99999999999999999999999999% of possible character combinations not resulting in useful complex computer subroutines. 

Darwin never knew about such a difficulty, because he never knew that the basic building blocks of living things are a huge number of different types of extremely organized information-rich protein molecules, things that cannot arise though some gradual process in which each little part addition produces a benefit. Darwin knew nothing about the complexity of protein molecules, and virtually nothing about the complexity of cells. 

I have not mentioned above the issue of protein complexes, the fact that a significant fraction of all protein molecules are functionally worthless by themselves, but only function properly when working as team members in protein complexes consisting of multiple types of protein molecules.  A scientific paper tells us the following:

"To become functional, proteins commonly depend on their interactions with other molecules. These molecules are known to include other proteins, which readily interact to form protein complexes. The majority of cellular processes are dependent on protein-protein interactions (PPI’s)1. An additional layer of complexity is added by the interaction of different protein complexes in so called super-complexes or metabolons."

A consideration of protein complexes and metabolons would only make the incredibly tiny, infinitesimal probabilities mentioned above many, many times more tiny and infinitesimal. 

Once biologists discovered the enormous organization and  fine-tuned functional complexity of protein molecules and cells, and the vast number of types of functional protein molecules and types of cells in the animal kingdom, each being a separate very complex information-rich invention incredibly unlikely to appear through any known natural process, such biologists should have ripped into shreds their boasts of understanding biological origins. The main reason they did not do such a thing may be  that claiming that you understand biological origins is a very addictive conceit, just like smoking opium is a very addictive pleasure. 

The median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 375.  Using ">>" to mean "much greater than," a mainstream scientific paper states this regarding a protein molecule with 300 residues (which means 300 amino acids): 

"Folding of a 300 residue sequence can be naively modeled as a random search through a space of over 10²⁸⁵ conformational states... Given this, it would take>> 10²⁰⁰ times the present age of the universe for a particular folding to occur, even assuming a sampling rate of 1 trillion conformational states per molecule per second and a volume of concentrated protein solution the size of Earth's oceans."

So as I state above, we vastly underestimate the unlikelihood  of a functional protein molecule forming from random amino acid combinations,  if we compare this unlikelihood to the chance of an unguided interstellar spaceship accidentally going into orbit around a planet in the nearest solar system.  

How is it that protein molecules fold into the three-dimensional shapes needed for them to be functional? This is what is called the protein folding problem, and it has not been solved.  Do not be fooled by people making the inaccurate claim that some AlphaFold2 software has solved the protein folding problem. Such people are confusing two very different problems:

(1) The protein folding prediction problem, the problem of how to use artificial intelligence software to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein, given some vast database containing the amino acid sequences of millions or very many thousands of proteins, and the corresponding 3D shapes of such proteins. 

(2) The protein folding problem, which is the problem of how the human body is able to cause more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules to achieve 3D shapes necessary for their function, with each type of protein molecule having a different 3D shape. 

Progress in the first of these problems is not at all progress of the second of these problems. The partial predictive success of the AlphaFold2 software has done nothing to solve the protein folding problem, the second of these problems.  Protein folding is actually one of the major reasons for believing in a doctrine I will eventually discuss in this document: the doctrine of continuous biological agency or GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force). 

So far I have only discussed the organization of protein molecules. There are many other types of organization in human bodies. One is the enormous organization of cells.  The human body has about 200 types of cells, each of which is so complex a unit that it has been compared to a factory in its complexity.  

To credibly explain the vast organization and functional complexity of human bodies, what is needed is a theory of organization. Darwinism is no such thing. Darwinism is a mere theory of accumulation. You can't credibly explain mountainous levels of organization constantly discovered by biologists through a mere theory of accumulation. 

The average person knows very little about the vast levels of organization and fine-tuned functional complexity in human bodies and the bodies of all mammals. This is largely because very many of those in charge of biology education have for a very long time acted in a way to hide such realities from the attention of their students and the general public.  This has been the most gigantic failure of education on the part of such authorities, and this failure is one of the biggest reasons for lacking confidence in the proclamations of such authorities. It is not merely that such authorities are constantly hiding from our attention gigantically important biological realities that they should be constantly reminding us of.  It is also that such authorities have habitually used what I call "shrink-speaking language," designed to give us the impression that great cathedrals of biological innovation are like mere crumbs.  The misleading use of language has been a central feature of Darwinism from its very beginning. One of the springboards that helped Darwinism get started was the misleading phrase "natural selection," which was a misleading term for a survival-of-the-fittest effect which was not actually selection (selection being a term meaning a choice by a conscious agent). 

The essential flaw of Darwinism is illustrated by the diagram below. The theory appeals to a filter or sieve called "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest" that filters out bad results, leaving only good results that increase reproduction or survival.  But that isn't a theory of organization, nor is it a credible account of how the human genome appeared.  There would be such a low probability of lucky gene accidents that not even a single human protein molecule can be credibly explained under such a theory.  Among the things we need to explain are 20,000+ types of human protein molecules, none of which we would expect to exist under Darwinian assumptions. 

For an explanation of why the concept of gradualism does not credibly explain the wonders of biology, see my post "Anatomically Uninformative DNA, Nonfunctional Intermediates and Useless Early Stages Are Why Gradualism Does Not Work."  The claim that Darwin explained the origin of species is a socially constructed legend that was built upon misleading language and misleading claims, and this legend becomes more and more unbelievable the more we learn about the vast levels of organization and fine-tuned functional complexity in biological organisms. 

The Third Main Clue About Reality: The Lack of Any DNA Anatomy Specification That Can Explain the Progression from a Speck-Sized Zygote to the Vast Organization of a Human Body

Not long after DNA was discovered about the middle of the twentieth century, scientists and science writers began spreading a false idea about DNA: the idea that DNA contains a specification for building an organism.  There are various ways in which this false idea is stated, all equally false:

• Many described DNA or the genome as a blueprint for an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a recipe for making an organism.
• Many said DNA or the genome is a program for building an organism, making an analogy to a computer program.
• Many claimed that DNA or genomes specify the anatomy of an organism. 
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) specify phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism).
• Many claimed that genotypes (the DNA in organisms) "map"  phenotypes (the observable characteristics of an organism) or "map to" phenotypes.
• Many claimed that DNA contains "all the instructions needed to make an organism."
• Many claimed that there is a "genetic architecture" for an organism's body or some fraction of that body. 
• Using a little equation,  many claimed that a "genotype plus the environment equals the phenotype," a formulation as false  as the preceding statements, since we know of nothing in the environment that would cause phenotypes to arise from genotypes that do not specify such phenotypes.

There was never any justification for making any such claims. The only coding system that has ever been discovered in DNA is a system allowing only low-level chemical information to be specified.  That coding system is known as the genetic code, and it is merely a system whereby certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs in DNA stand for amino acids.  So a section of DNA can specify the amino acids that make up a protein molecule. But no one has ever discovered any coding system by which DNA could specify anything larger than a protein molecule. 

No one ever discovered any coding system in DNA by which parts of DNA can specify high-level anatomy such as the arrangement of parts in an organ, or a skeletal structure, or an overall body appearance.  No one has even discovered any coding system in DNA by which the structure of cells can be specified.  The human body has at least 200 types of cells, and the structure of none of these cell types is specified by DNA. DNA does not even specify the structure of organelles that are the building blocks of cells.

If you ponder the simple fact that blueprints don't build things, you can start to get an idea of how nonsensical is the claim that a human arises because a DNA blueprint is read.  Blueprints have no power of construction.  When buildings are built with the help of blueprints, it is because intelligent agents read the blueprints to get an idea of what type of construction work to do, and because intelligent agents then follow such instructions. But there is nothing in the human body below the neck with the power to understand and carry out instructions for building a body if they happened to exist in DNA. 

Consider what goes on when you read a web page at a complicated site such as www.facebook.com or www.buzzfeed.com.  What occurs is a very complicated interaction between two things: (1) a web page that is rather like a blueprint for how the page should look and act, and (2) an extremely complicated piece of software called a web browser, which is rather like a construction crew that reads the web's page blueprint (typically written in HTML), and then constructs very quickly a well-performing web page.  If the web browser did not exist, you would never be able to get a well-performing web page.  The construction of a three-dimensional human body would be a feat trillions of times more complicated than the mere display of a two-dimensional web page.  Just as it is never enough to have just a web page without a web browser,  having some DNA blueprint for building a body would never be enough to build a body.  You would also need to have some "body blueprint reader" that would be some system almost infinitely more complicated than a web browser, in order for a body to get built.  

We have no evidence that DNA contains any instructions for building cells or anatomy, and we also have no evidence for the existence of any such thing as a "body blueprint reader" in the human body, capable of reading, understanding and executing incredibly complicated instructions for building a human body. When you consider the amount of organization in a human body, you may start to realize the gigantic absurdity of thinking that a human specification can be found in some molecule merely listing low-level chemical information. 

The organization of large organisms is extremely hierarchical.  Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into amino acids, which are organized into protein molecules, which are organized into protein complexes, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, which are organized into organisms. 

Cells are so complex they have been compared to cities. The diagrams you see of cells are enormously misleading, making them look a thousand times simpler than they are.  A cell diagram will show 20 or 30 organelles in a cell, but the actual number is typically more than 1000.  A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae, but a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.  There are about 200 different types of cells in the human body. 

Internally organisms are enormously dynamic, both because of constant motion inside in the body, and also because of a constant activity inside the body involving cellular changes. Just one example of this enormously dynamic activity is that fact that protein molecules in the brain are replaced at a rate of about 3% per day. A large organism is like some building that is constantly being rebuilt, with some fraction of it being torn down every day, and some other fraction of it being replaced every day.  The analogy comparing a cell to a factory gives us some idea of the gigantically dynamic nature of organisms.

When we consider this complexity, you may realize that the very idea of a blueprint for building a body is an absurdity. To have a visual specification for building a human body, you would need something more like a thousand-page textbook filled with color diagrams and tons of fine print.  Even if such a specification existed in the human body, it wouldn't explain morphogenesis: because the specification would be so complex it would require some super-genius to understand it all and build things according to such a specification. 

Here are a few relevant quotes by authorities, which collectively deny any claim that DNA (i.e. the human genome) has any such thing as a blueprint or a recipe or a program for making a human body: 

• On page 26 of the book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
• Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
• Describing conclusions of biologist Brian Goodwin, the New York Times says, "While genes may help produce the proteins that make the skeleton or the glue, they do not determine the shape and form of an embryo or an organism." 
• Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading."
• Neuroscientist Romain Brette states, "The genome does not encode much except for amino acids."
• In a 2016 scientific paper, three scientists state the following: "It is now clear that the genome does not directly program the organism; the computer program metaphor has misled us...The genome does not function as a master plan or computer program for controlling the organism; the genome is the organism's servant, not its master.
• In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."
• Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
•  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
• Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox.
• "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
• "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
• Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
• Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."
• Ian Stevenson M.D. stated "Genes alone - which provide instructions for the production of amino acids and proteins -- cannot explain how the proteins produced by their instructions come to have the shape they develop and, ultimately, determine the form of the organisms where they are," and noted that "biologists who have drawn attention to this important gap in our knowledge of form have not been a grouping of mediocrities (Denton, 1986; Goldschmidt, 1952; B. C. Goodwin, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1994; Gottlieb, 1992; Grasse, 1973; E. S. Russell...Sheldrake, 1981; Tauber and Sarkar, 1992; Thompson, 1917/1942)."
• Biologist B.C. Goodwin stated this in 1989: "Since genes make molecules, genetics...does not tell us how the molecules are organized into the dynamic, organized process that is the living organism."
• An article in the journal Nature states this: "The manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains 'one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time', says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City."
• Timothy Saunders, a developmental biologist at the National University of Singapore says, "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms.”
• On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need."
• A paper by Stuart A. Newman (a professor of cell biology and anatomy) discussing at length the work of scientists trying to evoke "self-organization" as an explanation for morphogenesis states that "public lectures by principals of the field contain confidently asserted, but similarly oversimplified or misleading treatments," and says that "these analogies...give the false impression that there has been more progress in understanding embryonic development than there truly has been." Referring to scientists moving from one bunk explanation of morphogenesis to another bunk explanation, the paper concludes by stating, "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."
• Referring to claims there is a program for building organisms in DNA, biochemist F. M. Harold stated "reflection on the findings with morphologically aberrant mutants suggests that the metaphor of a genetic program is misleading." Referring to  self-organization (a vague phrase sometimes used to try to explain morphogenesis), he says, "self-organization remains nearly as mysterious as it was a century ago, a subject in search of a paradigm." 
• Writing in the leading journal Cell, biologists  Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart and Tim Mitchison stated, "The genotype, however deeply we analyze it, cannot be predictive of the actual phenotype, but can only provide knowledge of the universe of possible phenotypes." That's equivalent to saying that DNA does not specify visible biological structures, but merely limits what structures an organism can have (just as a building parts list merely limits what structures can be made from the set of parts). 
• A paper co-authored by a chemistry professor (Jesper Hoffmeyer) tells us this: "Ontogenetic 'information,' whether about the structure of the organism or about its behavior, does not exist as such in the genes or in the environment, but is constructed in a given developmental context, as critically emphasized, for example, by Lewotin (1982) and Oyama (1985)."
• Biologist Steven Rose has stated, "DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand."
• At the Biology Stack Exchange expert answers site, someone posted a question asking which parts of a genome specify how to make a cell (he wanted to write a program that would sketch out a cell based on DNA inputs).  An unidentified expert stated that it is "not correct" that DNA is a blueprint that describes an organism, and that "DNA is not a blueprint because DNA does not have instructions for how to build a cell." No one contradicted this person's claim, even though the site allows any of its experts to reply. 
• "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism," states Templeton Prize-winning physicist and astrobiologist P. C. W. Davies.

So how does a full-sized human body manage to arise from the tiny barely visible simplicity of a speck-sized egg existing just after human conception? This is a miracle of origination a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. 

The lack of any anatomy specification in DNA and the fact that DNA does not even specify the structure of cells is one of the most important clues about the nature of reality a person can learn. But in order to learn from such a clue, you have to ponder the implications. The first very dramatic implication is that Darwinism cannot be a correct explanation for the origin of large organisms or things such as the human body. 

Darwinism has always maintained that mutations can accumulate to produce dramatic structural transformations, such as an ape-like or chimp-like species gradually changing into a human species, or fish species gradually changing into reptile species.  However enormously unlikely such a transformation might be,  it would at least be not utterly impossible if an organism carries inside it some genetic plan that specifies an anatomy; for such a plan might be changed by mutations. But what if the genetic material passed from one generation to the next contains no specification of anatomy, and fails to even have a specification of the structure of cells? That is a fatal difficulty for Darwinism, a "show-stopper."  If DNA does not specify anatomy,  then one species gradually changing into some other species with a vastly different anatomy through random mutations is not just improbable, but seemingly downright impossible.

The second enormous implication of the fact that DNA does not specify either anatomy or the structure of cells is that there must be some unknown causal reality that brings such wonders of biological organization into existence. The enormous organization and hierarchical dynamic complexity of living organisms and the lack of explanation for this in DNA leads us to the idea that will be discussed later in this document: the concept of continuous biological agency or GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force).  

The Fourth Main Clue About Reality: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe's Fundamental Constants and Laws

It would require enormously improbable luck for any universe to be habitable, that is to be a universe in which living beings such as ourselves can exist. I can compare such luck to the astonishing luck a person might have if he managed to face quite a few firing squads, without being killed by any of the bullets from such firing squads.  

"Firing squad survival" #1: the ratio of positive and negative electric charge. We take for granted a feature of our universe that would be enormously improbable in random universes with electric charges: the electrical neutrality of matter.  Electrical neutrality means that the total amount of positive electric charge that we observe on our planet is roughly equal to the total amount of negative charge that we observe on our planet. 

Such a balance exists because of two things:

(1) Every proton has an electric charge that is the very precise opposite of the charge on every electron (a fantastically improbable "coincidence" that is unexplained by modern science).  This seems very inherently improbable, because each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than the mass of each electron. 

(2) The number of protons is about equal to the number of electrons. 

The universe would be uninhabitable if there was not the type of balance listed above.  The chemical reactions necessary for biochemistry require a rough balance of positive and negative charge in our bodies.  Moreover, given that gravitation is a force more than a trillion trillion trillion times weaker than electromagnetism, even a slight imbalance in the ratio of positive charges and negative charges in large astronomical bodies would prevent large bodies like planets and suns from holding together by gravitation. 

On pages 64-65 of his book "The Symbiotic Universe," astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) said this about the equality of the proton and electron charges (which have precisely the same absolute value): 

"Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." 

In fact, experiments do indicate that the charge of the proton and the electron match to eighteen decimal places. So here we have a case of cosmic fine-tuning in which the numbers are fine-tuned to eighteen decimal places, with our existence very much depending on such a case of fine-tuning. If such a fine-tuning existed to only sixteen decimal places, things like the Sun would not even hold together, because the electromagnetic repulsion of their particle charges would be greater than the gravitational attraction holding such bodies together. 

By far the most likely result from this "firing squad" would be an uninhabitable universe. The second-most-likely result (vastly more likely than the result we got) is one that would have left only a barely habitable universe.  In the second-most-likely result there would be a large imbalance of positive and electric charges that might still barely allow observers, but which would be fantastically inconvenient.  There would be excesses of electric charges all over the place, meaning people would very, very often die just by stepping on a rock and being killed by its static electricity. 

Humans managed to escape this "firing squad" by getting neither the most-likely result nor the second-most-likely result, but a vastly improbable result in which electric charge imbalances kill almost no one. 

"Firing squad survival" #2: the strong nuclear force and radioactivity. The two fundamental nuclear forces in our universe are the weak nuclear force (involved in radioactivity) and the strong nuclear force (which holds together the nucleus of an atom). The nucleus of atoms such as carbon consists of neutrons with no charge and protons with a positive charge. All particles with the same charge repel each other, particularly when they are very close together. So if it were not for the strong nuclear force, the nucleus of an atom such as carbon and oxygen could not exist for more than a second; the electromagnetic repulsion of the protons would cause the nucleus to fly apart.

In his book The Accidental Universe physicist Paul Davies says that if the strong nuclear force were 5 percent weaker, the deuteron (a nucleus consisting of a proton and a neutron) could not exist, making it “doubtful if stable, long-lived stars could exist at all.” He also notes that if the strong nuclear force were 2 percent stronger, a nucleus called a diproton (consisting of only two protons and no neutrons) would exist, making it doubtful that “any hydrogen would have survived beyond the hot primeval phase” near the time of the Big Bang (and also causing all kinds of problems for the existence of stars like the sun).  It is not just the strength of the strong nuclear force that is very convenient, but also its range. If the force was not so very short-ranged, it would preclude the possibility of the complex carbon molecules needed for life. 

If you reduce the strength of the strong nuclear force by a small amount, then very common atoms such as carbon and oxygen would be radioactive, because the strong nuclear force would be weak enough that protons in such atoms would occasionally fly apart from electromagnetic repulsion. If you reduce the strength by a somewhat smaller amount, atoms such as carbon and oxygen could not even exist, because the electromagnetic repulsion of protons would prevent them from ever forming. 

Cosmologist Luke Barnes states this in a recent paper:

"If the strong force were a few percent weaker, the deuteron would be unbound (Pochet et al., 1991). The first step in stellar burning would require a three-body reaction to form helium-3. This requires such extreme temperatures and densities that stable stars cannot form: anything big enough to burn is too big to be stable... Weaken the strong force by a few more percent, or increase the strength of electromagnetism, and carbon and all larger elements are unstable (Barrow & Tipler, 1986). The parameters of the standard model must walk a tight-rope in order to form stable nuclei and support stable stars."

The most likely result in a random universe would be either no strong nuclear force, or a strong nuclear force with a strength or range that would prevent the possibility of life. The second most likely result in a random universe would be a strong nuclear force that would just barely allow life or observers to exist, under very harsh circumstances.  Either the stability of stars would be greatly less or radioactivity would be vastly more common, so common that bodies would be internally radioactive, which would prevent people from living beyond about 20, and make cancer very many times more common.  We survived both the most likely result of this "firing squad," and also the second-most likely result. The result  we have is the least likely result, one which allows for biochemistry, and in which radioactivity is almost no problem for humans. 

The "jackpot" of a habitable universe is so hard to get

"Firing squad survival" #3: particle masses and the fine structure constant. In his book The Particle at the End of the Universe (page 145 to 146), Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll says the following:

"The size of atoms...is determined by...the mass of the electron. If that mass were less, atoms would be a lot larger. .. If the mass of the electron changed just a little bit, we would have things like 'molecules' and 'chemistry', but the specific rules that we know in the real world would change in important ways...Complicated molecules like DNA or proteins or living cells would be messed up beyond repair. To bring it home: Change the mass of the electron just a little bit, and all life would instantly end."

Besides the luck involved in the electron mass having a suitable value, our universe also had great luck in regard to the neutron mass having a suitable value. Physicist Paul Davies says that if the neutron mass were .998 of its actual value, protons would decay into neutrons, and there would be no atoms at all (The Accidental Universe, page 65). Conversely, if the neutron mass were slightly greater, it would mean there could be no long-lived stars like the sun. Section 4.8 of the paper here discusses many different ways in which life and stable molecules and stable stars require a fine-tuning of particle masses and a fundamental constant called the fine structure constant. That section of the paper justifies these statements:

(1) By far the most likely result in a random universe would be particle masses and a fine-structure constant preventing life.  

(2) The second most likely result in a random universe would be particle masses that would allow observers, but prevent observers with long lives (because of high radioactivity) and prevent stable stars like the sun. 

What we got from this "firing squad" is the third-most-likely result, one in which we have a gloriously stable sun allowing long-lived civilizations, and also very little radioactivity. 

"Firing squad survival" #4: heavy elements. After the Big Bang, there was only hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium and beryllium. Scientists tell us that all of the other elements were produced inside of stars or from stellar collisions or stellar explosions. Advanced life requires lots of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Having a civilization requires additional elements such as iron. Iron may also be required for intelligent life to exist on planets. The scientific paper here tells us says "Life-forms that do not require iron are exceedingly rare; indeed, only two are known (Borrelia burgdorferi and Lactobacilli)." The same paper gives us geological reasons for doubting that a planet like Earth could have existed unless there was abundant iron in its core. 

Astronomers say that some of the elements originated in stars that did not blow up, and others originated in stars that did blow up in supernova explosions. A universe must meet many requirements to get all the needed elements in abundant amounts. For one thing, there has to be something like the weak nuclear force that exists in our universe, because that is needed for supernova explosions. Another thing needed are just the right nuclear resonances, which have to exist in the right way to assure the abundant production of carbon and oxygen by stars. In this paper  scientists conclude, “Thus, even with a minimal change of 0.4% in the strength of the N-N force, carbon-based life appears to be impossible, since all the stars then would produce either almost solely carbon or oxygen, but could not produce both elements.”

Below are the number of protons in the nucleus of different elements:

Hydrogen: 1 proton in nucleus

Helium: 2 protons in nucleus

Lithium: 3 protons in nucleus

Beryllium: 4 protons in nucleus

Boron: 5 protons in nucleus

Carbon: 6 protons in nucleus

Nitrogen: 7 protons in nucleus

Oxygen: 8 protons in nucleus

Phosphorus: 15 protons in nucleus

Iron: 26 protons in nucleus

Copper: 29 protons in nucleus

Gold: 79 protons

The heavier the element, the more requirements there are for its large-scale existence.  Scientists can explain the lightest elements (hydrogen, helium, beryllium and lithium) solely by appealing to the Big Bang, although their predictions about the amount of lithium are currently off the mark.  To explain the origin of carbon and oxygen, scientists evoke dying low-mass stars. To explain oxygen, scientists also currently appeal to supernova explosions (things that have many dependencies and prerequisites).  To explain iron, scientists appeal to both supernova explosions (involving very massive stars), and also exploding white dwarf stars. 

Scientists currently lack any credible explanation for the existence of elements such as gold and silver. They are currently trying to explain such elements by imagining the extremely far-fetched hypothesis of colliding neutron stars.  Since the estimated number of neutron stars in our galaxy is only about 2000, and since the chance of neutron stars colliding in a galaxy as large as ours is extremely low, this explanation fails to be credible. An alternate theory (imagining something almost as far-fetched) is way off in its predictions of gold and silver abundances, off by about 500%.   

There are very many fine-tuned dependencies all over the place when we talk about element abundances. Because of the requirement mentioned above, the most likely outcome from a random universe would be either not enough carbon for life or not enough oxygen for life. The second most-likely outcome would be only enough carbon and oxygen for life to occur only as a very rare fluke on a planet (with few organisms), and not enough iron, copper, and other very heavy elements for a technical computerized civilization such as ours to exist.  Instead against all odds we got the least-likely result of a universe in which we pretty much have all the elements a computerized technical civilization needs, in high abundances, and also essentially inexplicable luxuries such as the existence of gold and silver.  

"Firing squad survival" #5: dark energy (aka the cosmological constant). Dark energy (basically the same as the cosmological constant) is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe. It's not simply that we don't know enough about it. The mystery is that dark energy in our universe is so very small, even though quantum field theory suggests it should be so vastly larger. Scientists say that quantum uncertainty should cause an ordinary vacuum to be teeming with short-lived, fleeting particles called virtual particles. Those particles should give an ordinary vacuum a very high energy density. When scientists do the calculations, they come up with a number indicating that ordinary space should be filled with a vacuum energy density more than 10¹⁰⁰ times greater (more than a million billion trillion quadrillion quintillion sextillion times greater) than the maximum value consistent with astronomical observations (a problem known as the "vacuum catastrophe"). The simplest explanation is that there is some lucky balancing by which negative contributions to the vacuum energy density cancel out positive contributions, resulting in a net value near zero. But such a lucky balancing is incredibly improbable (far more improbable than the chance that all of the money you earned in your life would match to the penny, by coincidence, all the money that some stranger spent during his life). 

If dark energy had anything like the density predicted by quantum field theory, life would be impossible, as the space between suns and planets would be so dense that sunlight could not travel through it (and also movement around on a planet would be impossible). Although the issue is poorly studied by cosmologists, we can be all but certain that a lesser but still fairly high dark energy would have left us only a barely habitable universe.  The most likely situation by far would be dark energy preventing any observers, and the second-most likely situation would be dark energy causing a universe that was just barely habitable, without luxuries such as abundant biodiversity, long-lived observers and long-lived technical civilizations.  We escaped both the most likely and second-most likely results from this "firing squad," and enjoy the luxury of a universe in which dark energy causes zero problems for us. 

It seems, therefore, that our universe has been blessed with enormous amounts of fine-tuning. You can get a better idea of how much fine-tuning we enjoy by comparing our universe to a barely habitable universe (something that would be a billion trillion quadrillion times more likely than a universe such as ours).  Below are some relevant comparisons:

Let us consider some ways in which our human and earthly results are vastly better than merely what is needed to have observers. They include the following:

(1) An observer might exist without any planet at all, perhaps arising on some comet or interstellar cloud or harsh moon. But on Earth observers enjoy a beautiful planet to explore. 

(2) In a barely habitable universe, an observer might exist as some fluke occurrence,  with zero or only a handful of other observers known to him, without any society surrounding him. But on Earth observers have a fascinating society all around them to enjoy. 

(3) In a barely habitable universe, each observer might have an incredibly hard and painful life, wracked by problems such as stellar fluctuations, radioactivity, explosions caused by antimatter, and death or painful results caused by excess electric charges.  But most people on Earth enjoy comparatively comfortable lives. 

(4) In a barely habitable universe, all observers might be immobile, existing as organisms like trees or sponges. This is because the amount of cosmic fine-tuning luck needed for mobile observers is much greater than the amount of luck needed for immobile observers. But on Earth people have the luxury of being able to move around. In fact, nowadays (thanks to the luxury of heavy metals such as iron) people even have the luxury of being able to explore distant lands by using trains or jets. 

(5) In a barely habitable universe, conditions might be so harsh that most observers might have either ridiculously short lives or lives that do not last much beyond reproduction. But on our planet very many people live comfortably for sixty years or more after first being a mother or father. 

(6) In a barely habitable universe, it would be very unlikely that societies could exist, and if societies did exist, they would be short-lived affairs because of things such as stellar instability which would wipe out any civilization after fifty years or more of its existence. But on Earth we have societies and cultures that last for centuries or thousands of years. 

(7) In a barely habitable universe, there would be very low biodiversity on any planet, as the appearance of any new species would be fantastically unlikely. But on Earth we have gloriously  extravagant levels of biodiversity, with more than a million animal species for us to use and enjoy.  The paper here says, "Planets with Earth-like levels of biodiversity are likely to be very rare," a claim it makes based on only geological and astronomical reasons.  

(8) In a barely habitable universe, conditions would be so harsh for life that there would probably be no observers capable of communicating with each other through luxuries such as speech and language. 

(9) In a barely habitable universe, conditions would be so harsh that there would probably be no intelligent life at all, but merely very stupid observers (such as fish or reptiles or blob-like organisms) incapable of advanced thought or philosophy. 

(10) In a barely habitable universe,  it would be very unlikely that there could ever exist advanced civilizations that developed computers and something like the Internet. Harsh conditions would prevent societies from lasting long enough for the development of high technology. Moreover, a lack of metals such as iron and copper  would tend to prevent the existence of machines such as computers. 

(11) In a barely habitable universe, fundamental constants might vary from spot to spot, so that observers might find themselves in some rare little fluke spot in which the constants allowed habitability, preventing any possibility of taking long journeys. We, on the other hand, have the luxury of being able to travel around a whole habitable planet. 

How have scientists responded to all the evidence suggesting our universe is fine-tuned, and that for a universe such as ours to be habitable you need the kind of luck that would be needed if you survived five consecutive firing squads, each with ten rifle shooters? The response they have made "speaks volumes." Rather than denying the need for such fine-tuning, our scientists have "grasped at straws" by the most ridiculous act of desperation: the act of appealing to the possibility of some vast ensemble of universes or some infinity of universes. This is the most extravagant and futile maneuver in the history of science or philosophy. 

The explanatory futility of the idea of the multiverse is very clearly explained in my post "The Top 6 Problems With Using a Multiverse To Explain Cosmic Fitness."  Those problems are as follows: 1. A multiverse explanation is the worst imaginable violation of Occam's Razor.  2. A theory of a multiverse is unverifiable metaphysics that can never be confirmed by observations. 3. A theory of a multiverse makes one believe in the exact opposite of what our observations tell us --- that the laws and properties of nature are the same everywhere.  4. A multiverse explanation “proves” the wrong thing – that some universe would be habitable (without increasing the chance that our universe would be habitable).  5. There is no verified case of anything ever being successfully explained by a type of explanation like a multiverse explanation, nor can we plausibly imagine any such case ever being verified.  6. A multiverse theory can “explain” any claim, no matter how absurd; as it can “explain” anything, it explains nothing. 

Of these, the most important one is number 4. Imagining a multiverse does absolutely nothing to increase the probability of our universe being habitable. You do not even increase by 1 percent the likelihood of our universe being habitable by imagining some infinity of other universes. Similarly you do not increase by even 1 percent your chance of winning the next Powerball lottery if you imagine that there is an infinity of universes containing an infinity of lottery players playing lotteries just like the Powerball lottery.  So the multiverse is a true nadir of philosophical reasoning: an assumption that is infinitely or near infinitely extravagant, but which has no explanatory value. 

The fact that so many scientists have appealed to a multiverse as a desperate attempt to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and laws does have one advantage: it makes very clear how very substantive and real are descriptions of such fine-tuning. Clearly the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and laws has thoroughly shaken to the core those scientists wishing to believe we live in a purposeless, accidental universe, causing them to reach for the very desperate measure of evoking some infinity of other universes.  

Multiverse reasoners commit very bad reasoning by considering only two classes of universes: habitable universes and inhabitable universes. They claim that we should not be surprised to accidentally find ourselves in a habitable universe, because observers could only exist in such a universe. A proper analysis will distinguish between four classes of universes: uninhabitable universes, barely habitable universes with conditions much harsher than ours, moderately habitable universes with conditions substantially harsher than ours, and a universe with the luxury results that we have.  Under the scenario of your accidental appearance, it would be quadrillions of times more likely for you to find yourself in a barely habitable universe much harsher than ours than a universe like ours with so many luxury results. I explain this point very fully in my post "Our Luxury Results Debunk the Multiverse As an Explanation." 

The diagram below helps to illustrate a much more realistic classification scheme like the one just described, one involving four categories: uninhabitable universes, barely habitable universes, moderately habitable universes, and luxury-permitting universes like the one we live in. 

For the sake of being easy to view, the diagram is a very schematic one. Instead of consisting of multiple pixels, the right edges of each bar should more realistically have a width of only a single pixel. Because of reasons such as the reasons given above, we have every reason to suspect that barely habitable universes should be more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more unlikely than uninhabitable universes, and that luxury-permitting universes such as ours should be billions or trillions of times more improbable than barely habitable universes. 

The Fifth Main Clue About Reality: Brain Physical Shortfalls

Some of the Six Main Clues About Reality discussed above have been discussed at length by other thinkers. But the Main Clue About Reality I will now discuss has escaped the attention of almost all philosophers. This clue is one of importance that cannot be overemphasized.  The clue I refer to is the clue of the human brain's many severe physical shortfalls. The human brain has physical shortfalls that very strongly indicate to the objective scholar a supremely important truth: that the brain cannot be the source of the human mind, and cannot be the storage place of human memories. Below is a discussion of some of these shortfalls: 

Brain physical shortfall #1:  the lack of any stable place in a brain where learned information could be stored for decades. Humans can hold memories for 50 years or longer. If you are to explain such memories under the idea that brains store memories, there needs to be a place in the brain that can store memories for 50 years or longer. There is no such place in the brain. 

Here we have a gigantic failure of the most commonly cited idea of neural memory storage, the groundless claim that memories are stored in synapses. The proteins in synapses are very short-lived, having average lifetimes of two weeks or shorter. The paper here lists the mean (average) lifetime of synaptic proteins as a mere five days. Synapses do not last for years. Synapses are so small that it is all but impossible to track how long they last. But we know that synapses are connected to microscopic little bumps on the dendrites in the brain, called dendritic spines, which are much larger than synapses. Scientists can track how dendritic spines change over time. Such observations have shown that dendritic spines are short-lived, usually lasting no more than a few weeks or months, and seemingly never lasting for years.

With the exception of the DNA inside the nucleus of neurons, neurons offer no place for stable information storage. In theory, you could store information for decades in the DNA in the nucleus of a neuron. But there is no sign that human learned information is ever written to DNA. When doctors extract some part of a brain to reduce seizures, they find neurons that all have the same information in their DNA: mere genetic information that is basically the same in every cell, including cells from your feet. The genetic code used by DNA is merely a code allowing for the representation of amino acids, not a code for allowing the representation of the things humans learn in school.  

Brain physical shortfall #2:  the lack of any mechanism in the brain for writing learned information. We know how a computer stores information. There is a spinning hard disk, and what is called a read/write head.  The head is a tiny unit capable of writing to any point on the disk, and reading from any point on the disk. Both the disk and the read/write head can move, which allow the read/write head to be positioned over any point on the disk, so that data can be read from anywhere on the disk, or written to anywhere on the disk. 

If brains were to store memories, a brain would need to have some kind of mechanism for writing a new memory. But no such mechanism seems to exist. There is no kind of "read unit" or "write unit" that moves around from place to place on a brain to read and write. 

In this regard neuroscientists are empty-handed. Don't be fooled by unfounded claims that the artificial effect called long-term potentiation is some kind of mechanism for memory.  What is misleadingly called “long-term potentiation” or LTP is a not-very-long-lasting effect by which certain types of high-frequency stimulation (such as stimulation by electrodes) produces an increase in synaptic strength. Synapses are gaps between nerve cells, gaps which neurotransmitters can jump over. The evidence that LTP even occurs when people remember things is not very strong, and in 1999 a scientist stated (after decades of research on LTP) the following:

"[Scientists] have never been able to see it and actually correlate it with learning and memory. In other words, they've never been able to train an animal, look inside the brain, and see evidence that LTP occurred."

Since it does not last for years, and is almost always a very short-term effect, LTP cannot be some mechanism by which permanent memories are written to the brain. A recent scientific paper states this:

"It actually remains to be demonstrated that LTP = memory in most mammalian learning models. In fact, most studies of long-term plasticity do not explore beyond an hour or two; clearly not enough to establish a direct link with long-term memory formation."

Brain physical shortfall #3:  the lack of any mechanism in the brain for reading learned information. If your brain were the storage place of your memories, your brain would need to have not just a mechanism for writing stored memories, but also some mechanism for reading memories that had been previously stored. No such thing seems to exist in the brain. We may contrast our lack of any known mechanism for a brain reading memory information to our very good understanding of the reading of genetic information from DNA. A molecular biologist can explain in great detail a microscopic process called transcription by which parts of DNA molecules are read to produce RNA molecules. So it's not like our molecular biologists lack the tools to understand some process for reading memories stored in brains if it were happening. Such molecular biologists have exactly the tools and the powerful microscopes to understand any process of neural reading of memories, if such a process were to occur. But no molecular biologist or neuroscientist can explain how a brain is able to read a memory such as something you learned in school or some experience you had. If anyone tries to do such a thing, he will only be engaging in the wildest speculation.  

Brain physical shortfall #4:  the lack of any signal transmission mechanism in the brain fast enough to account for instant human recall and fast thinking.  Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash has been called the world's fastest calculator, and can do things such as multiply 869,463,853 times 73 correctly in only 26 seconds, giving an answer of 63,470,861,269. This is despite having a very serious head injury which required 86 stitches, and left him with a prominent scar on his forehead. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, "Scott Flansburg of Phoenix, Arizona, USA, correctly added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times in 15 seconds without the use of a calculator on 27 April 2000 on the set of Guinness World Records in Wembley, UK." There are countless recorded cases of such blazing fast "all in the mind" calculation involving math or dates, and the cases often involve people with defective brains. For example:

• A Dr. J. Langdon Down described a 12-year-old boy who could multiply any three numbers by any other three numbers, as quickly as Down could write the six numbers on paper.
• A Dr. Alfred F. Tredgold mentioned a person who could give the square root of any four digit number in an average of four seconds, and who could give the cube root of any six-digit number in about six seconds. He said that when the same person "was asked about how many grains of corn there be in any one of 64 boxes, with 1 in the first, 2 in the second, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth, and so on, he gave answers for the fourteenth (8,192), for the eighteenth (131,072), and the twenty-fourth (8,388,608) instantaneously, and he gave the answer for the forty-eighth box (140,737,488,355,328) in six seconds," and that he "also gave the total in all 64 boxes correctly (18,446,734,073,709,551,615) in forty-five seconds."
• A blind boy named Fleury was of such low intelligence he had to be institutionalized, but he could calculate 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) in only 40 seconds, and could calculate the cube root of 465,484,375 (which is 775) in 13 seconds.
• A pair of twins named George and Charles (born three months prematurely) could do calendar calculations with blazing speed. We read this: "Give them a date and they can give you day of the week over a span of 80,000 years, 40,000 backward or 40,000 forward." Also, we read that if you "ask them to name in which years in the next 200 (or any 200) Easter will fall on March 23," then they "will name those years with lightning rapidity, faster than a computer and just as accurately." This seems all the more impressive when you consider that the rules for when Easter will occur in a particular year are quite complicated.

The brain has a shortfall that should prevent such blazing fast and accurate thinking from happening if thinking came from the brain: the shortfall of the slow average transmission speed of brain signals.  The widely quoted figure of about 100 meters per second for brain signals is very misleading. That is the fastest that a signal can travel in any part of the brain, when signals pass through myelinated axons. But most axons in the cortex are not myelinated, and most of the tissue in the brain consists of relatively slow dendrites. According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites (see here for a similar estimate). That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons. Then there is the enormous slowing factor caused by the need for brain signals to cross across synapses, serious "speed bumps" that should slow down brain signals very much. 

There is no reason to think that the average speed of signals in the brain should be much faster than the speed at which electrical signals travel around the brain during seizures. The paper here lists a speed of only about 1 millimeter per second for seizures in the human brain, saying, "Seizures propagate slowly to connected areas with speeds on the order of 1 mm/s."  There is no reason to think that some hypothetical brain signals involved in thinking would occur much faster than seizures. The problem is that such a speed is way, way too slow to account for the blazing fast mental speed of the world's fastest calculators.  Such sluggish signal speed means that brains cannot be a credible explanation for the very common phenomenon of instant memory recall.  If I asked you "who was defeated at Waterloo," you can answer instantly, but it would take many minutes or hours for you to find the answer if you had to retrieve the answer using a brain like the human brain in which the average signal speed is slow. 

Brain physical shortfall #5:  the lack of any encoding system by which brains could translate learned information into synapse states or neural states.  We know how genetic information is stored in cells: by the simple mapping system called the genetic code. Do a Google image search for "genetic code" and you will find a simple diagram showing how such a system works. The genetic code was discovered around 1950. If there were some encoding system in the brain by which learned information was translated into neural states or synapse states, we would have in all probability have discovered such a system decades ago. No such system has ever been found in the brain. No scientist can give even a credible explanation of how a simple phrase such as "my dog has fleas" could be stored in a brain. 

Brain physical shortfall #6:  the lack of any region of the brain with activity strongly correlating with thinking, memory formation or recall. If I use my hand to retrieve an apple from a table, my body does two things to tell me my hand is being used to perform that retrieval. First, I can see my hand grasping the apple. Second, I can feel the apple in my hand when I grasp it. But when I retrieve a memory such as a memory of my youth, my body never does anything to suggest that such an activity was caused by my brain. Your head feels exactly the same when you are retrieving a memory and when you are not thinking of anything. Scans of the brain during activities such as thinking, memory formation and recall fail to provide any robust evidence of brain activity spiking during such activities. As discussed here and here, attempts to find evidence of such activity merely find differences of only about 1 part in 200 in signal strength, which is merely what we might expect to find from very minor chance variations. In this matter neuroscientists have long been guilty of a very bad deception: the deception of "lying with colors" by presenting patently misleading visuals in their papers. What goes on so often is that signal differences of only about 1 part in 200 in certain areas of the brain are shown with deceptive visuals depicting such regions in a bright color such as bright red or bright blue or bright yellow. Such misleading visuals give the impression that there is some big brain activity difference during certain types of mental activities, when there is no such big difference, but merely a difference of only about 1 part in 200, the kind of difference we would expect from chance fluctuations. 

Brain physical shortfall #7:  very high brain signal noise, and the lack of any capability in the brain for reliably transmitting signals throughout brain tissue. A neuron acts as an electrical/chemical signal transmitter. A neuron will receive an electrical/chemical input, and transmit an electrical/chemical output. But a neuron does not act as efficiently and reliably as a cable TV wire or a computer cable that transmits signals with a very low error rate. Neuroscientists know that a large amount of noise occurs when neurons transmit signals. In other words, when a neuron receives a particular electrical/chemical input signal, there is a very significant amount of chance and variability involved in what type of electrical/chemical output will come out of the neuron. The wikipedia.org article on “neuronal noise” identifies many different types of noise that might degrade neuron performance: thermal noise, ionic conductance noise, ion pump noise, ion channel shot noise, synaptic release noise, synaptic bombardment, and connectivity noise.

In an interview, an expert on neuron noise states the following:

"There is, for example, unreliable synaptic transmission. This is something that an engineer would not normally build into a system. When one neuron is active, and a signal runs down the axon, that signal is not guaranteed to actually reach the next neuron. It makes it across the synapse with a probability like one half, or even less. This introduces a lot of noise into the system."

So according to this expert, synapses (the supposed storage place of human memories) transmit signals with a probability of less than 50 percent. Now that's very heavy noise – the kind of noise you would have if half of the characters in your text messages got scrambled by your cell phone carrier.  A scientific paper tells us the same thing. It states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." 

Another scientific paper tells us, “Neuronal variability (both in and across trials) can exhibit statistical characteristics (such as the mean and variance) that match those of random processes.” Another scientific paper tells us that “Neural activity in the mammalian brain is notoriously variable/noisy over time.” Another paper tells us, "We have confirmed that synaptic transmission at excitatory synapses is generally quite unreliable, with failure rates usually in excess of 0.5 [50%]." A paper tells us that there are two problems in synaptic transmission: (1) the low likelihood of a signal transmitting across a synapse, and (2) a randomness in the strength of the signal that is transmitted if such a signal transmission occurs. As the paper puts it (using more technical language than I just used):

"The probability of vesicle release is known to be generally low (0.1 to 0.4) from in vitro studies in some vertebrate and invertebrate systems (Stevens, 1994). This unreliability is further compounded by the trial-to-trial variability in the amplitude of the post-synaptic response to a vesicular release." 

The 2010 paper "The low synaptic release probability in vivo" by Borst is devoted to the topic of what is the chance that a synapse will transmit a signal that it receives. It tells us, "A precise estimate of the in vivo release probability is difficult," but that "it can be expected to be closer to 0.1 than to the previous estimates of around 0.5." 

Another paper concurs by also saying that there are two problems (unreliable synaptic transmission and a randomness in the signal strength when the transmission occurs):

"On average most synapses respond to only less than half of the presynaptic spikes, and if they respond, the amplitude of the postsynaptic current varies. This high degree of unreliability has been puzzling as it impairs information transmission."

This reality of unreliable synaptic transmission is a fatal difficulty for all claims that memories are retrieved from brains, because humans are known to be able to remember things very accurately, but “neural noise limits the fidelity of representations in the brain,” as a scientific paper tells us. 

The table below illustrates an example of noise in a signal transmission system.

Type of system	Input	Output
Low-noise system	“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”	“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”
High-noise system	“Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”	“Tojo, I've a f2@eling we're Xot in K3$sas anym3re.”

There is so much noise in the brain, and synaptic transmission is so unreliable, that is should be impossible for humans to remember significant blocks of text accurately if memory recall occurs from a reading of information in the brain. Humans can not merely remember significant blocks of text, but can also remember very long blocks of text with perfect accuracy. This is shown every time an actor plays the role of Hamlet (a role of more than 1000 lines) without committing an error, or every time a tenor sings the role of Siegfried (requiring a singer to sing almost constantly onstage for about three hours). 

Brain physical shortfall #8:  the lack of any token repetition in the brain other than the nucleotide base pair tokens capable of representing only low-level chemical information such as sequences of amino acids.  Tokens are a vital part of any physical system of information storage. A token is a low-level symbolic unit that helps to store information. The main tokens used in books are letters of the alphabet. The tokens used in images found in either books or computer files are pixels, tiny dots of some particular color. The tokens used in the digital files are binary tokens such as 1 and 0. A particular word may be stored in a computer using a sequence of tokens. By doing a Google search for "text to binary converter," you can see how sequences of letters are converted to sequences of binary numbers. For example, the word "alligator" is stored using a binary sequence of "01100001 01101100 01101100 01101001 01100111 01100001 01110100 01101111 01110010." 

Only one type of token sequence has ever been discovered in the brain: the nucleotide base pair tokens capable of representing only low-level chemical information such as sequences of amino acids, according to the simple representation scheme called the genetic code. Such sequences (found in DNA) exist in neurons and almost all other cells of the body.  No other type of token sequence has ever been discovered in the brain. This shortfall suggests very strongly that the brain cannot be any storage place of human memories. We can find in the brain no sign of any "neural code" that might be used to represent complex information humans learn. We see no sign of the token repetition that would be the hallmark of such a neural code. 

Brain physical shortfall #9: the lack of any discovered stored memories in dissected brain tissue or dissected corpses. Scientists nowadays have extremely powerful microscopes capable of examining brain tissue at incredibly high resolutions. Scientists also have incredibly powerful computers and databases that work with such microscopes. A 2019 article gives us a taste of this power:

"The researchers had to stitch together some 50,000 'cubes' of data — each representing a 3D bit of the brain — and then make sense of it. They developed a computing system to piece together a complete picture that accounted for all those minuscule movements during the imaging process. That made it possible to count the synapses across the entire fly brain — roughly 40 million— and detail how the density of those synapses varies in different areas. They traced proteins, tiny cellular protrusions known as dendritic spines, and dopaminergic neurons. "

But despite all of this microscopic and computing power, no one has ever read a single memory extracted from the living human during surgery or from the brain of a dead person. Microscopic investigations are compatible with the idea that the human brain does not store memories. 

Brain physical shortfall #10: the lack of any mechanism allowing a very rapid transformation of brain tissue or synapses sufficient to account for instant memory formation. You can write data instantly to computers, because computers have a physical architecture allowing for electronic instant data storage. You can write data very quickly on a notepad because a pen and a notepad allow data to be written at a pace of about five characters per second. Humans can form complex new memories instantly. But the brain has no physical features that could allow for such instant memory formation. Most ridiculously, our neuroscientists sometimes try to cover up this very obvious shortfall by sometimes claiming that it takes many minutes or hours to form a memory. That is a lie, and we all  can form complex new memories instantly. For example, you know exactly how a theatrical play ended the moment the final curtain is pulled. You don't have to wait for 30 minutes or an hour to form such a memory.  

Brain physical shortfall #11: the lack of any indexing system or sorting  or addressing system that could help to explain instant memory recall.  Humans build things that allow instant retrieval of information, things that include indexed books and computers. From such things we understand the type of things that make instant retrieval of information possible: things such as addressing and indexes. No such things exist in the brain. 

Addressing is some system whereby unique spatial positions have unique identifiers. We are all familiar with one type of addressing: the unique addresses of houses in a city. Addressing is also used in books, where each page has a unique address (its page number). Addressing is also used by the Internet. The URL of a web page is a unique address allowing browsers to quickly find one particular page among all the pages of the internet. Addressing is also used on digital devices such as smartphones and computers. On my computer a file name combined with a full path name makes up a unique address for a file. For example, on my computer a particular file has the unique address of c:\windows\write.exe.

No one has ever discovered any type of addressing system used by the brain to identify particular cells or synapses. Neurons do not have neuron numbers or neuron names or neuron addresses, and synapses do not have synapse numbers, synapse names or synapse addresses. Sorting is something else that can help allow fast information retrieval. An example is found in books. Books have unique page numbers, but you would not be able to use the index of the book to find information quickly if the pages of the book were not sorted in numerical order. Another type of sorting that facilitates fast information retrieval is alphabetical sorting. An example of such sorting can be found in a one-volume encyclopedia. It is easy to find information quickly on any topic, because there is an alphabetical sorting of the articles. Similarly, if you have a large file cabinet filled with 100 or more manila folders, you can find some desired information quickly if the folders are arranged in alphabetical order. 

No one has ever discovered any type of physical sorting in a brain. The physical arrangement of the brain makes a sorting of neurons impossible and a sorting of synapses impossible. Once a neuron exists, it is attached to so many synapses that it cannot move around in the brain. Synapses are also stuck in their current position, and cannot move or be moved around in any way that would allow sorting.  In this sense both neurons and synapses differ from blood cells, which can move around from place to place in the body. 

Indexing is something that can facilitate the fast retrieval of information. Indexing is used at the back of books. Indexing is also a crucial part of database systems that allow a fast retrieval of information.  For indexing to be used effectively, a system must have both addressing and sorting. For example, you can index a book to allow fast retrieval of subject matter, but the book must have page numbers, and the page numbers must be in numerical order. 

There is no sign of any indexing in the brain. This should come as no surprise, given that effective indexing requires both sorting and addressing, neither of which exist in the brain. Given the complete lack of any sorting, addressing or indexing in the brain, there can never be any credible explanation of how instant memory recall could occur using a brain. 

Brain physical shortfall #12: the lack of any high organizational structure in the "spaghetti tangle" of neurons and synapses. Minds and memories can be incredibly organized.  For example, a person in New York City may remember that he is now in a living room, and that such a room is part of a house at a particular street address, and that such an address is part of a neighborhood such as Flushing, and that such a neighborhood is part of a New York City borough (Queens), and that such a borough is one of five boroughs  of a city (New York City), and that such a city is part of a state (New York State), and that such a state is one of the 50 states of the United States, and that such a country is part of a continent (North America), and that such a continent is part of a hemisphere (the Western Hemisphere), and that such a hemisphere is part of a planet (Earth), and that such a planet is part of a solar system, and that such a solar system is part of a galaxy. If there were a physical system allowing the storage of information so organized and hierarchical, it would be some system that would have some enormous level of organization allowing the hierarchical representation of information.  The brain is no such thing. Open a computer, and you will see on its motherboard something looking incredibly organized. Open someone's skull, and you will see a tangle of neurons and synapses that looks as disorganized as a huge vat of spaghetti.  

Collectively these brain physical shortfalls tell us in a very loud voice that the brain cannot be the source of the human mind and cannot be the storage place of human memories. But in news stories claiming to be "science news" you will often read stories claiming otherwise. This discrepancy is easily explained by factors such as these:

(1) Among today's neuroscientists there prevails extremely poor practices that are called Questionable Research Practices. These practices include: (a) routinely failing to use adequate study group sizes; (b) a lack of blinding protocols; (c) a lack of pre-registration so that experimenters can "keep torturing the data until it confesses," slicing and dicing data dozens or hundreds of ways until the data seems to tell whatever story the experimenters wish it to tell; (d) other very poor research habits such as judging animal fear from unreliable subjective judgments of "freezing behavior" rather than reliable measurements of heart rate. While people sometimes speak as if the widely-discussed Replication Crisis (in which most attempts at replicating scientific studies fail) is a crisis in psychology or social science, such a crisis is just as bad in experimental neuroscience, because of very poor practices followed in that field. 

(2) As I explain in my post "The Social Construction of Eager Community Mirages," any large community of well-funded researchers will tend to occasionally produce results that superficially appear to supports its claims, no matter how untrue such claims are.  A relevant equation is below:

Large community eager to prove some idea + lavish funding + weak research standards  + biased interpretation = occasional superficially persuasive results.

The current highly dysfunctional state of experimental neuroscience is only one aspect of widespread pathology in scientific academia, where we see many very severe problems, as illustrated by the diagram below.

  

The table below summarizes some of the failures of materialist scientists to explain biological organization and the human mind:

Question	Answer	Discussion
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance (in appreciable quantities) of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	What can be called the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life are chemical units such as amino acids and nucleotide base pairs. No such things have ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth. The widely discussed Miller-Urey experiment failed in multiple ways to be a realistic simulation of the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the main building blocks of one-celled life on the early Earth?	No.	The main "building blocks" of one-celled life are functional proteins, with even the simplest one-celled life requiring hundreds of types of proteins. No functional protein has ever been produced in any experiment realistically simulating the early Earth.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of one-celled life?	No.	Life has never been produced from non-life through any kind of laboratory experiment.
Did scientists credibly explain why life uses only left-handed amino acids, when laboratory experiments always produce equal numbers of left-handed and right-handed amino acids?	No.	This long-standing problem (called the homochirality problem) has never been credibly answered. Homochirality is accidentally unachievable.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of eukaryotic cells?	No.	The most popular current explanation for the appearance of eukaryotic cells (cells many times more complex than the simplest types of cells) involves an unbelievable appeal to non-Darwinian "endosymbiosis" events that are basically "miracles of chance."
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of any of the thousands of types of proteins used by the human body?	No.	The average protein molecule has about 400 amino acids, well-arranged to achieve a particular biological effect. The chance appearance of a functional protein molecule is as improbable as typing monkeys producing a long, grammatical, functional paragraph. Because protein molecules do not fold correctly and are not functional if half or a third of their amino acids are missing, you cannot explain the origin of protein molecules by an accumulation of parts that were each useful.
Did scientists credibly explain the occurrence of protein folding continually occurring in the human body?	No	Scientists cannot currently explain how sequences of amino acids are able to continually fold to form the 3D shapes used by protein molecules. Success in the different task of protein structure prediction (using advanced AI software and huge “deep learning” databases) does nothing to explain how protein folding occurs in the human body.
Did scientists credibly explain how cells find the right positions in a developing human body?	No	Claims that “morphogen gradients” do anything to solve this mystery are unfounded, and such claims merely shift the mystery from one place to another, creating an equally great mystery of how such chemicals could know where cells should go to.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human body?	No.	Human DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Since the "DNA as body blueprint" or "DNA as body recipe" or "DNA as body program" tales are all lies having no basis in fact, the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast organization of an adult human body is unexplained.
Did scientists credibly explain the appearance of any adult human mind?	No.	There are very many reasons why the human mind cannot be credibly explained as a mere product of the brain, or as the same thing as the brain.
Did scientists credibly explain the origin of the human species?	No.	The answer to this question could only be “Yes” if almost all of the answers above are “Yes.” Because all the answers above are “No,” the answer to this question is “No” in the loudest voice.

The Sixth Main Clue About Reality: Psychical and Paranormal Events

We have had nearly two hundred years of literary evidence for psychical and paranormal phenomena, much of it written by very distinguished observers such as scientists, professors and doctors. It is often claimed that serious scientific research into psychical and paranormal phenomena began in 1882 with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research. The fact that this incorrect claim keeps appearing shows the currently dismal state of knowledge about such matters in academia. The fact is that serious scientific research into the psychical and paranormal dates back at least as far as 1825, with the founding of the French Royal Academy of Medicine's second investigative panel on hypnotic phenomena. Six years later that panel made up of some of France's leading physicians issued a report resoundingly in favor of clairvoyance. 

Below are some of the main types of psychical and paranormal phenomena relevant to the question of whether the human mind is a spiritual reality or merely the product of the brain. 

Telepathy outside of the laboratory. The existence of telepathy outside of the laboratory is an extremely common human experience that would be recognized by many times more people were it not for the fact that materialist scientists have senselessly discouraged people from testing such an ability using their own families and friends. Researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here. I personally have had many dramatic experiences showing the reality of telepathy, which I describe in posts such as this post and this post. Every case of telepathy is utterly incompatible with the prevailing dogmas of neuroscientists. If your brain is what is making your mind (or the same thing as your mind), telepathy should be impossible. The utter incompatibility of such claims about the brain and reports of telepathy are why neuroscientists senselessly refuse to acknowledge nearly two hundred years of massive evidence for telepathy.  

Out-of-body experiences. Out-of-body experiences are a perfect example of experiences no one should ever have if prevailing neuroscientist dogmas were true.  In an out-of-body experience someone reports being outside of his body.  In a large fraction of all out-of-body experiences, a person reports observing his body from some position one meter or more away from his body. Such experiences simply should not occur if your brain is the same as your mind, or if your brain was creating your mind.  Under such dogmas, a person should be permanently trapped in his body, and should never be able to observe his body from outside of his body.  Instead of never occurring as predicted by prevailing neuroscience dogmas, out-of-body experiences are quite common. Descriptions of people having such experiences can be read here. The source here discusses a variety of surveys taken to try to determine how common out-of-body experiences are.  It gives  numbers which suggest that out-of-body experiences occur to significant fractions of the human population, something like between 10% and 20%. A scientific survey of a group of hospital patients found that 10% of patients with cardiac arrest had a near-death experience (NDE), with 19 of these 27 patients who reported an NDE reporting an out-of-body experience (OBE).  A different study found that "Of the 30 interviewable survivors of cardiac arrest, 7 (23 percent) described experiences classified as NDEs by scoring 7 or more points on the NDE Scale." Of these reporting a near-death experience in this study (11), 90% reported out-of-body experiences.  A Dutch study found 18% of cardiac arrest survivors reporting a near-death experience, but with only a minority of these reporting an out-of-body experience.  

Clairvoyance. We have nearly two hundred years of written evidence for clairvoyance, much of it written by distinguished physicians and scientists. There are various types of clairvoyance. Spontaneous clairvoyance may occur when someone reports the approach of an unexpected unseen visitor who very soon arrives at her doorstep. Some examples can be found here. Nineteenth century literature on hypnotism contains many accounts of people under hypnosis who (when guided on a kind of mental journey by someone familiar with a place) could correctly list all kinds of details of places they had never physically seen. Some examples of this effect (called traveling clairvoyance) can be found here, here,  and here.  What can be called "X-Ray" Clairvoyance  involves things such as the ability to correctly read through heavy blindfolds, or to correctly describe the contents of sealed letters and closed boxes, or to see within a human body.  Some examples can be found here, here and here. As discussed here and here, research into remote viewing (a modern term for clairvoyance) was long funded by the US government, with many successes reported. The phenomenon of clairvoyance cannot at all be explained within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas. 

Hypnosis at a distance or telepathic knockouts. A phenomenon in which a hypnotist can induce a trance in an unseen person is reported here and here.  On the page here we are told, "In 18 of 25 trials Janet and his colleague Gilbert were able to induce a trance in their hysterical subject Leonie at distances varying from 1/4 to 1 mile." The page here tells us the experiments of L. Vasiliev at the University of Leningrad were overwhelmingly successful in producing trances at a distance in subjects, with a 90% success rate, with most of the people trying to produce the trances being in different rooms, and the trance almost always occurring within a few minutes of the remote attempt to make the person entranced.  No such phenomenon should be possible if brains are the cause of human minds. 

Anomalous sensation phenomena. It has been very frequently reported that a hypnotized person may instantly feel sensations felt by the person who hypnotized him. A set of experiments on this effect is reported in the "First Report of the Committee on Mesmerism" pages 225-229 of Volume 1 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (April, 1883), a committee including the illustrious names of Frederic Myers,  Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, George Wyld M.D. and the eventually knighted physicist W.F. Barrett.  We read this on page 226: "Thus out of a total of 24 experiments in transference of pains, the exact spot was correctly indicated by the subject no less than 20 times."  Similar results were obtained by Dr. Edmund Gurney and reported in his paper "An Account of Some Experiments in Mesmerism," published on page 201 of Volume II of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research ( June 1884). As reported on page 205, a hypnotized subject identified with high accuracy tactile and taste sensations occurring in a hypnotist sitting behind him.  

Mirror touch synesthesia is a  rare effect by which non-hypnotized people seem to feel tactile sensations of nearby people.  The phenomenon is so well-documented that it is not even disputed by some who claim to be skeptical of all paranormal phenomena.   A search for "phantom limb pain" will find many matches in mainstream sources, including assertions that most amputees experience such pain (mysteriously arising as if the amputated limb still existed). Such experiences should not occur if the mind is merely the product of the brain, but are compatible with ideas such as the idea that you have a soul that may have sensitivity protruding outside of your body, sensitivity that may be increased under hypnosis. 

Near-death experiences, particularly veridical ones. A veridical near-death out-of-body experience is when someone having a close encounter with death reports moving out of his body, and is able to recall observational details that are later verified, details that should have been impossible for the person to have learned. Some compelling examples can be found here. Examples include patients who reported floating out of their bodies and reported seeing things on either the roof of the hospital or in floors above them, things they had no opportunity to discover with their ordinary senses.  Near-death experiences of this type completely defeat attempts to explain near-death experiences as hallucinations.  In general,  there is no explanation for dramatic near-death experiences within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas. Such experiences often are lengthy experiences occurring during cardiac arrest, and the brain very quickly flatlines within a few seconds after cardiac arrest, meaning no neural explanations of such events are credible. 

Apparition sightings, particularly crisis apparitions. Volume One of the massive two volume work Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore can be read online here, and Volume Two of the work can be read here. A significant fraction of the 700+ cases reported in that two-volume work are cases in which someone reports seeing or hearing an apparition of a particular person he did not know was dead, only to find out later that just such a person had died on about the same day or exactly the same day (and often on the same hour and day). I have described hundreds of such cases in the series of posts you can read below, which contain many other cases of such "crisis apparitions":

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

It Seemed Her Suicide Was Not Her End

When Crisis Appartions Seem to Notify of Someone's Death

Under prevailing neuroscience dogmas the only way to explain a case of this type is to assume a double coincidence: that someone coincidentally happened to have a hallucination (usually the first hallucination of his life) involving seeing a person who had died somewhere else at about the same time the hallucination occurred. Such double coincidences should be very rare, happening to far fewer than one person in a million.  But since the number of reports of crisis apparitions of this type are high, we cannot credibly explain them all by some theory involving a double coincidence that should almost never occur.

Sightings of the same apparitions by multiple witnesses. In seven previous posts I discussed cases in which multiple witnesses reported seeing the same apparition. The seven posts are below:

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

When Two or More See the Same Apparition

I can quote Edward W. Cox on why such cases are not credibly explained by explanations of neural hallucinations. Cox wrote this:

"But, if precisely the same form was seen by two persons at the same place at the same time, we have evidence, and very cogent evidence, of the actual existence of such an object, by reason of the extreme improbability that the identical hallucination should arise in two minds at the same moment. If three or more persons beheld the same object at the same time, the proof amounts almost to demonstration, for the chances against such a concurrence of mental actions are as infinity to one."

Terminal lucidity. Terminal lucidity occurs when someone who had long suffered from dementia suddenly seems to return to a normal, lucid state of mind just before dying. An example can be read on this page and the next page.  On page 410 of the book Irreducible Mind we read this:  

"Myers (1892b) had referred to the 'sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons' (p.316)...The eminent physician Benjamin Rush...observed that 'most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives' (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that 'at the approach of death we observed that ... the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity' (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvements in their condition shortly before death. In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, 'one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death' (p. 24)." 

No such thing as terminal lucidity should occur if your brain was producing your mind. Once a mind-producing brain had deteriorated, such a deterioration would be irreversible. A brain producing a mind would no more suddenly restore itself than a book missing many of its pages would suddenly restore such pages.

Experimentally reproducible precognition. Cornell University emeritus professor Daryl Bem wrote a paper published in a peer-reviewed scientific publication, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a paper that seemed to show experimental evidence for precognition. The widely discussed paper was entitled, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.” Skeptics were outraged by these results, claiming they would never be replicated. But they were replicated. The meta-analysis here ("Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events") discusses 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 different countries. The analysis reported an overall effect of p=1.2 X 10^-10. Roughly speaking, this means the results had a probability of about 1 in 10 billion. This is a very impressive result, showing statistical significance millions of times stronger than what is shown in typical papers reported by mainstream media. A typical paper that gets covered by the press will have a statistical significance of only about p=.01 or p=.05. There is no credible explanation of such evidence within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas.

Poltergeist activity. There have been many well-documented cases of many objects inexplicably moving around in particular places. Twelve well-documented cases are discussed in my post here. Credible explanations of such cases involve ideas such as mind over matter, or activity by invisible spiritual forces. There are no credible explanations for such cases within the straightjacket of prevailing neuroscience dogmas. 

Mind over matter. The mind-over-matter effect of table turning (also called table tipping) was reported with very great frequency by a host of distinguished observers in the nineteenth century. This phenomenon of table turning (and related anomalous phenomena) were scientifically investigated by a distinguished scientist, Harvard chemistry professor emeritus Robert Hare. Hare started out completely believing in Michael Faraday's idea that table turning was caused purely by muscular force. But his investigations led him to reject such an idea. In 1855 he published a long book reaching the conclusion that the phenomenon involved an inexplicable paranormal reality. For example, on page 46 he states, “I first saw a table continue in motion when every person had withdrawn to about the distance of a foot; so that no one touched it; and while thus agitated on our host saying, 'Move the table toward Dr. Hare,' it moved toward me and back again.” This is only one of countless paranormal incidents described in the book, which Hare mainly regarded as proof of some mysterious paranormal reality. He devised numerous scientific instruments to test paranormal effects, and frequently found them to give dramatic inexplicable results. 

This phenomenon of table turning was also scientifically investigated at length by Count Agenor de Gasparin, who published in 1857 a two-volume scientific book describing countless paranormal effects (such as table levitation and mysterious rappings) observed under controlled conditions. Gasparin's research is well-summarized in Chapter VI of the book Mysterious Psychic Forces by the astronomer Camille Flammarion.  For example, Gasparin described this happening on September 3, 1853:

“Some one proposed the experiment which consists in causing a table to rotate and give raps while it has on it a man weighing say a hundred and ninety pounds. We accordingly placed such a man on the table, and the twelve experimenters, in chain, applied their fingers to it. The success was complete: the table turned, and rapped several strokes. Then it rose up entirely off the floor in such a way as to upset the person who was upon it.”

Such a result is inexplicable through any theory of subconscious muscle movement. Gasparin reported the following occurring on October 7, 1853:

“Let us turn again to the finest of all demonstrations, that of levitation without contact. We began by performing it three times. Then, since it was thought by some that the inspection of the witnesses could be carried on in a surer way in the case of a small table than in that of a large one, and with five operators more certainly than with ten, we had a plain deal centre-table brought which the chain, reduced by half, sufficed to put in rotation. Then the hands were lifted, and, contact with the table being entirely broken, it rose seven times into the air at our command.”

Since this was a report of levitation of a table without contact, it obviously cannot be explained through Faraday's “ideomotor effect” of subconscious muscle movement. Shockingly, the phenomenon of table turning had stood up well to rigorous scientific experiments, with the investigators finding it to be a mysterious paranormal reality rather than something they could debunk.

Something similar was reported in 1855 by Eliab Wilkinson Capron, who reported that a “table moved on the floor with nobody touching it – moved to the distance of a foot or more and back, in various directions.” In 1869 the London Dialectical Society (a rationalist organization) launched a major scientific investigation of phenomena such as table turning. It concluded that “movements of heavy bodies take place without mechanical contrivance of any kind or adequate exertion of muscular force by the persons present, and frequently without contact or connection with any person.” Excerpts of the report of the committee can be read here, and the entire report can be read here. The twentieth century provided numerous additional examples of mind over matter, something that should never occur if the mind is merely the product of the brain. 

Medium activity seeming to show unaccountable knowledge of the deceased. The case of Leonora Piper is one of the most astonishing cases in the annals of psychic phenomena.  Witnesses who met with her repeatedly claimed that she seemed to have knowledge that could not have been acquired through any well-understood means. For many years Piper would fall into a trance, and then begin speaking in a different-sounding voice, often a voice of someone identifying himself as someone other than Piper. Such a mysterious "control" would often seem to know things that Leonora Piper could not possibly have known.  In later years under such trances Piper would produce writings called automatic writings. The case of Leonora Piper was extremely well documented in the Proceedings and Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Using the link here takes you to my post linking to the original documents and the testimony of investigators. The original publication describing such observations can be read here. 

On page 438 we read this: "Mr. Hodgson has been in the habit of bringing acquaintances of his own to Mrs. Piper, without giving their names; and many of these have heard from the trance-utterance facts about their dead relations, etc., which they feel sure that Mrs. Piper could not have known."  On page 440 we read this introductory remark by Frederic Myers:

"On the whole, I believe that all observers, both in America and in England, who have seen enough of Mrs. Piper in both states to be able to form a judgment, will agree in affirming (1) that many of the facts given could not have been learnt even by a skilled detective ; (2) that to learn others of them, although possible, would have needed an expenditure of money as well as of time which it seems impossible to suppose that Mrs. Piper could have met ; and (3) that her conduct has never given any ground whatever for supposing her capable of fraud or trickery. Few persons have been so long and so carefully observed ; and she has left on all observers the impression of thorough uprightness, candour, and honesty."

This all occurred in the late nineteenth century, which excludes all explanations of technological trickery. Within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas, there is simply no explanation for a case such as this. So neuroscientists as a rule avoid mentioning it.  

Long-term "body borrowing." Two very well-documented cases of this phenomenon are discussed in my long post "When Minds Seem to Borrow Bodies."  In both cases a living person claimed to be a person who had previously died, showing memories matching those of the deceased person. Such cases (one being the Watseka Wonder case) have no explanation within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas. 

The evidence accumulated by William Crookes. Sir William Crookes was one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. Besides being the co-discoverer of the element thallium, Crookes was the inventor of the Crookes tube, a technological ancestor of devices such as television sets, computer monitors, tablet devices and smartphones. An extremely careful scientific observer, Crookes spent years investigating paranormal phenomena, and reported spectacular results involving the mediums Florence Cook and Daniel Dunglas Home, including things such as the levitation of a human body, music coming from an accordion untouched by humans, and the frequent appearance of materialized apparitions. 

Deathbed apparitions and visions. Some examples can be found here and here and here.   A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person." 

 A 1949 book states this: 

"It is a commonplace truth, observed by many physicians and clergymen, that a dying person, when conscious near the moment of death, acts or speaks as if he saw standing near loved ones who have already died. Dr. Russell Conwell told Bruce Barton in the interview quoted earlier in another connection, that he had witnessed this phenomenon 'literally hundreds of times.' "

The main scholarly work studying this phenomenon ("At the Hour of Death" by Osis and Haraldsson) presented large evidence for the phenomenon in a way that discredited hallucinations and drugs as an explanation. 

Telepathy verified under laboratory conditions. Some very convincing examples of ESP under experimental conditions are discussed here, here and here. The table below (from the link here) summarizes the results of Professor Joseph Rhine's laboratory experiments with Hubert Pearce at Duke University. These are tests in which the expected success rate is 5 out of 25, or 1 in 5. There is no way to work in some hypothesis of cheating with the results reported here. The table shows that Pearce got the same super-dramatic results even in a series of 650 trials when he was looking away from the cards, and also in a series of 300 trials in which there was a screen separating the cards and Pearce.

Even more impressive was the result of a remote test, in which a Professor Riess performed thirty-seven experimental sessions in which a 26-year old woman in a different building was asked to guess which of 5 ESP cards had been randomly chosen by Professor Riess. The woman guessed an average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, achieving a phenomenal 73% accuracy rate (instead of the expected accuracy rate of 20%). This was the result in "Series A" of two series of tests with the young woman. The chance of getting such a result accidentally is far less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000 (this link estimates the probability of getting these results by chance as 1 in 10 to the 700th power, which is smaller than the chance of you correctly guessing all of the social security numbers of  a set of 70 strangers).  Page 36 of Louisa Rhine's book ESP in Life and Lab tells us the story of the Riess remote ESP test described above.  The Riess experiment is also discussed on page 167-168 of Rhine's book Extra-sensory Perception After Sixty Years ( see here or here).  Another discussion of the experiment is here. 

A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion.  Within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas, all such results are inexplicable.  Since the results are largely remote results produced by people separated by distance, they cannot be explained by any speculative theory that the brain can act as a radio transmitter and radio receiver (a theory not supported by any neuroscience studies). 

Results such as those I have discussed above are senselessly ignored by the vast majority of professors. Within academia there is a senseless taboo against seriously investigating and studying the paranormal. This abject failure to pay attention to one of the main clues about the nature of reality is one of the main reasons why we should lack confidence in the generalizations and proclamations of professors on topics such as human minds and the origin of mankind.  When people  so often "stick their heads in the sand" when confronted with evidence against their cherished dogmas, we should lack confidence in their assertions about how reality works. A very important point to remember is that when professors generalize about paranormal phenomena, they are almost always speaking about a topic they have not seriously studied.  For example when a physics professor who has never bothered to seriously study the evidence for psychical and paranormal phenomena proclaims that such phenomena are impossible, such a proclamation should be taken no more seriously than when some cab driver proclaims his opinion about quantum chromodynamics or some other very complicated topic he has not seriously studied.  The serious study of psychical and paranormal phenomena requires the very careful reading of hundreds of long volumes, and a professor denying the paranormal will typically not even have read more than ten or twenty of such volumes.  Some of the many volumes that should be read by scholars of psychical and paranormal phenomena are listed in this post. 

I myself have personally witnessed a host of paranomal events, and my personal experience has included the photography of more than 800 mysterious striped orbs, which often had dramatically recurring patterns. You can see such photographs here.  I also photographed more than a thousand cases of a mysterious organization of matter occurring in falling water drops, as you can see in my long book here.  I have published videos showing inexplicable events that strongly suggest the power of some mysterious invisible agency. 

The First Conclusion of Teleospiritism: The Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force (GOAL)

I have now finished discussing each of the six things referred to in my original diagram as "The Six Main Clues About Reality." I have used the term "clue" in the broadest way, often to refer to a very large body of evidence. Each of these "Six Main Clues About Reality" serves as a pillar to support the conclusions of the philosophy of teleospiritism. Now we finally come to the part of this long discussion in which I can discuss such conclusions. 

Teleospiritism asserts that the human species and the universe we live in cannot be the results of mere accidents or chance, but must be realities existing because of intelligent purpose. We are not accidents, our species is not an accident, and our universe is not an accident.  All of the Six Main Clues About Reality I have discussed support this conclusion. If the universe suddenly began in an extremely fine-tuned way, it makes no sense to believe that the universe is an accident. If our universe has a whole long series of laws and fundamental constants that are fine-tuned in a way allowing intelligent life to exist in it, fine-tuning we would not expect even 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 random accidental universes to have, it makes no sense to believe that our universe is some accident. If the universe is filled with organisms showing the most enormous levels of organization and purposeful arrangement and functional biological complexity, such a reality gives great weight to the conclusion that our reality is a thoroughly and fundamentally teleological reality. If our DNA does not have any specification of how to make cells or our bodies, it becomes all the more obvious that our bodies cannot be the result of accidental changes in DNA; for no conceivable changes in DNA can explain our physical bodies. If our brains have gigantic physical shortfalls all over the place meaning that our brains cannot be either the source of our minds or the storage place of our memories, then no materialist explanation of our minds is possible, and our minds must be the product of some magnificent causal agency beyond our bodies, which we may reasonably suspect is related to or the same as some causal agency needed to explain the appearance of our bodies and the appearance and habitability of our universe. If there is abundant evidence of paranormal and psychical abilities of the human mind that can never be explained as brain activity, the idea that we must come from some top-down effect (some agency beyond our bodies) becomes all the more inevitable.

The facts of biology force upon us the conclusion that there must exist some continuous biological agency working perpetually with enormous intelligence and unfathomable power to produce many of the known effects of biology such as vast levels of biological organization. We can refer to such activity using the term "continuous biological agency" or by using the acronym GOAL, which stands for Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force. 

The failure of attempts to explain the origin of human bodies by bottom-up low-level chemical factors is the most gigantic shortfall, as great as the shortfall of someone who tries to explain the continued phenomenon of large building construction by evoking little principles such as "stuff sticks together" or "bricks can pile up."  To have a credible hypothesis of the origin of enormously dynamic physical states of vast organization such as the human body,  we must assume a purposeful top-down organizational effect. Given a lack of anything in a human body that explains the full reproduction of a human (not to be confused with mere pregnancy), it is utterly insufficient to assume that such a purposeful organizational effect merely acted in the past. We should assume that such a purposeful organizational effect acts continuously throughout all of our lives, and acts across all parts of the planet in which large superbly organized organisms exist.  A good acronym to describe such a reality is the acronym GOAL, which stands for Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force. Such an acronym is suitable, given the dramatically teleological and purposefulness of such an agency. 

We need to postulate such a GOAL force acting not just long ago but every day. One reason is that across the globe inside millions of pregnant women there is unfolding every day the mysterious process of morphogenesis, the progression from a speck-sized egg to a full-sized baby.  Nothing understood by chemists or biologists can explain such miracles of organization occurring in bodies in which DNA does not specify any high-level structural information.  Although they have classified various stages in cellular reproduction such as anaphase and prophase, our scientists cannot even credibly explain what causes the reproduction of any eukaryotic cell in the human body.  (A search on the biology preprint server for papers with "kidney" in the title returns 250 matches, but searching for  papers with "cell reproduction" in the title returns only one match.)  Diagrams of the stages of cell reproduction make cell reproduction look a thousand times simpler than it is,  since they depict cells with only a few organelles, even though eukaryotic cells have hundreds or thousands of organelles of quite a few different types.  

Inside the human body there continuously occurs the mysterious phenomenon of protein folding.  Our DNA specifies the linear polypeptide sequences of more than 20,000 proteins used by the human body. But such proteins have intricate three-dimensional shapes needed for their proper function, and there is no good evidence that DNA specifies the three-dimensional shape of any protein. The diagram below shows the difference between a polypeptide chain and a protein that results from that chain after protein folding occurs. Each of the 20,000+ types of proteins in the human body has its own distinctive 3D shape. 

Although there has been some limited partial success in predicting the 3D shapes of protein molecules using their amino acid sequences (and also using a huge database of many thousands of amino acid sequences and their corresponding 3D shapes), no scientist has anything like an understanding of how the folded 3D shapes of protein molecules are able to arise from DNA molecules that merely specify sequences of amino acids.  The mystery of protein folding is still unsolved. It would seem logical to presume that the same mysterious organizational activity needed to explain morphogenesis and human reproduction is also at work continuously in each of our bodies, to achieve the protein folding that continuously occurs in our bodies.

Should we assume that such a GOAL effect is produced directly by some all-powerful supernatural mind? Such an assumption may or may not be correct. There are quite a few different possibilities, and it would be best to think of such a GOAL agency in vague and imprecise terms, given our lack of knowledge. Such a biological organization effect might be produced directly by the continuous willful action of one or more supernatural agents. Or it could be produced by some intermediate agency or causal apparatus set up by some supernatural agent.  We know that humans can set up automated programs to achieve particular effects. Conceivably there could be some kind of automated agency that achieves biological targets and maintains the biological order in organisms.  Once it had been established, such an agency might not require further willful effort from the agent that created it. 

In his book The world of life : a manifestation of creative power, directive mind and ultimate purpose, Alfred Russel Wallace (co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection) made some statements that are quite the opposite of some of the claims of today's champions of such a theory.  Below (from page 337 of the book) is one of those statements. As you read the statement, keep in mind that DNA does not specify the physical structure of any of the 200 types of cells in human beings, and that DNA is no answer to the "organized by what" question being raised. 

"The cell is now defined as 'a nucleated unit-mass of living protoplasm.' It is not a mere particle of protoplasm, but is an organised structure. We are again compelled to ask, Organised by what? Huxley, as we have seen in Chapter XV., tells us that 
life is the organising power ; Kerner termed it a vital 
force ; Haeckel, a cell-soul, but unconscious, and he 
postulated a similar soul in each organic molecule, and 
even in each atom of matter. But none of these verbal 
suggestions go to the root of the matter ; none of them 
suppose more than some  'force,' and force is a cause of 
motion in matter, not a cause of organisation. What we 
must assume in this case is not merely a force, but some 
agency which can and does so apply, and direct, and guide, 
and co-ordinate a great variety of forces mechanical, 
chemical, and vital so as to build up that infinitely complex machine, the living organism, which is not only self- 
repairing during the normal period of existence, but self- 
renewing, self-multiplying, self-adapting to its ever-changing 
environment, so as to be, potentially, everlasting. To do 
all this, I submit, neither 'life' nor 'vital force' nor the 
unconscious 'cell-soul' are adequate explanations. What 
we absolutely require and must postulate is, a Mind far 
higher, greater, more powerful than any of the fragmentary 
minds we see around us, a Mind not only adequate to 
direct and regulate all the forces at work in living 
organisms, but which is itself the source of all those forces 
and energies, as well as of the more fundamental forces 
of the whole material universe."

In such a statement, Wallace very much suggests the need to postulate something like the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force (GOAL) that I postulate here,  something far more organizational and directive than some simple force such as gravity.  Nothing we have learned about DNA invalidates any of Wallace's statement.  In fact, because scientists during the past 100 years have continually discovered ever-more-astonishing wonders of organization, coordination and very precise fine-tuned activity most abundantly in cells and organisms,  which they have almost entirely failed to credibly explain,  Wallace's statement quoted above may be more applicable than ever.  Now that we know cells are a thousand times more organized than Wallace ever dreamed, reasoning like the paragraph I just quoted seems more "on the right track" than ever.   

Like some person who doesn't know about TV production studios and TV cameras and who very wrongly assumes that everything he sees on his TV must be produced only by the tiny components inside his TV,  our scientists are stuck on the silly idea that the magnificent hierarchical organization and fine-tuned dynamism of human bodies can be explained by some "bottom-up" effects in which breathtaking miracles of organization and staggering wonders of cellular choreography bubble up from mere tiny chemicals.  The GOAL concept is the entirely different idea that we can only explain such mountainous levels of hierarchical organization and fine-tuned dynamism by assuming a "top-down" effect, by which human bodies get organized by some unfathomable agency coming in some sense  from outside of human bodies.  A person thinking along the lines of the GOAL concept is like a person who correctly realizes that the components inside a TV are utterly inadequate to explain the visuals shown by the TV, and that such visuals must have been produced by some causal agency outside of the TV. 

How did our scientists fail to see the need to postulate such a GOAL effect to explain the otherwise inexplicable reproduction of large incredibly organized organisms?  I can give three main reasons. The first is that many scientists (like very many non-scientists) confused the very easy task of explaining the beginning of pregnancy with the almost infinitely more difficult task of explaining human reproduction and morphogenesis. The second reason is that scientists made the mistake of assuming that any wonder that occurs most of the time or very often must somehow be something that is a result of laws of nature. 

We can imagine a similar thing happening on another planet. Let us imagine a planet called Providentia in which whenever someone jumps from a high height, he always lands gently without damage; and whenever someone is very hungry outdoors without food, a nice meal falls from the sky, slowly descending so the person can catch the food. If such things had always been observed on the planet, the scientists on the planet might think such things were not too special. They might say there is simply a "Law of Gentle Landings" that explains the lack of injury from cliff falls, and a "Law of Convenient Meal Deliveries" that explains the descent of meals from the sky to hungry persons.  They might think such things are nothing special, and no evidence of any work from some higher power.  This would be a case of failing to see the providential nature of a very impressive result, simply because such a result always happens.  

Just such a thing seems to occur when earthly scientists ponder human reproduction.  What occurs on Earth every year is almost infinitely more impressive and wondrous than the events I imagine above occurring on the planet Providentia. The gradual growth from a speck-sized egg to the gigantically organized reality of a full human body is actually a wonder a billion times more impressive than someone falling from a high cliff without injury or meals conveniently descending from the sky to the hands of hungry people.  But just like the scientists of Providentia,  our scientists take such a wonder for granted,  because it occurs so often. 

The third reason why our scientists have failed to see the need to postulate such a GOAL agency is because they deluded themselves with childish tall tales such as the bunk claim that human bodies arise from blueprints for making humans stored in DNA.  The fact that such a tale bears no resemblance to the truth (DNA containing no such blueprint) is a sign of very great dysfunction within biological academia.  Whenever you see some group telling outrageous lies, you should suspect that such a group is largely on the wrong track, and you should be open to explanations that are diametrically opposed to the explanations that have been offered by such people.   

I can contrast this idea of GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force) with a much weaker idea often advanced: an idea I may call "long-ago-design." What we can call long-ago-design theorists are a group who recognize that ideas such as Darwinism are utterly insufficient to explain the enormously impressive wonders of biology.  Such theorists attempt to address this great shortfall by postulating that some type of biological design occurred long ago to help produce the wonder of a human being.   

Some examples of long-ago-design theorists include the following:

(1) people who maintain that humans arose from some pair of humans specially created by a deity thousands of years ago;

(2) people who do not explicitly endorse such a claim, but who merely say that there must have been some type of intelligent design that helped give rise to humans, presumably coming from some divine agency long ago;

(3) people who maintain that humans arose after visiting extraterrestrials modified some earthly organisms long ago, to help produce the human species. 

While none of these ideas can be excluded, an extremely important point is that none of these ideas comes anywhere close to solving the explanatory problems facing the honest scholar of biology. Specifically:

(1) Partially because DNA does not contain any specification for making a human body or any of its cells or even the organelles of such cells, you cannot explain the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body by merely imagining either some intelligent tinkering with DNA long ago or by imagining the full creation of human organisms long ago. 

(2) Because brains do not explain the human mind and do not explain human memory capabilities, no theory of long-ago-design can explain how current humans have the minds and memories they have. 

To explain the astounding realities of human biology, we must postulate a cause sufficient to explain the enormously impressive effects.  We must postulate a causal reality that can be called either  continuous biological agency or GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force).  Such continuous biological agency can be conceived as a top-down effect of unfathomable intelligence and power, acting throughout every year to help achieve biological organization in earthly organisms, and the biological continuation of earthly organisms. 

How exactly such agency works is unknown. We can imagine a few possibilities:

(1) Some super-active supermind of unfathomable intelligence and power may be constantly at work to achieve the teleological effects of biology.

(2) Or, the teleological effects of biology may be achieved by some huge army of intermediate conscious agents under the direction of such a supermind. 

(3) Or, there may exist some gigantically complex "programming" that achieves such teleological effects, with this powerful "programming" having originated from some supermind of unfathomable intelligence.

(4) Or, continuous biological agency may be achieved by some other way that we cannot currently imagine. 

In this case the vague term "agency" is a good one to be using.  The Merriam Webster dictionary gives this definitions of "agency" (among others):  " a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved : INSTRUMENTALITY."  The Collins English Dictionary gives two definitions of "agency" (among others):

"1.  active force; action; power

2.  that by which something is done; means; instrumentality"

Searching for "agency definition" using the Google search engine gives us this definition from the Oxford Languages source used by that search engine (supposedly the world's leading dictionary): "action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect."

So the word "agency" is a good term to be using to describe some unfathomable effect causing the appearance and persistence of fantastically organized organisms.  The term is sufficiently broad that it does not lock us in to some exact commitment as to how such agency works. But the term clearly implies action that is teleological, with the purpose of achieving some particular effect.  By the term "continuous biological agency" I mean vastly purposeful instrumentality working throughout biology to achieve the enormously purposeful effects of biology, such as the production of human bodies. 

Should we imagine that this GOAL (Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force) or continuous biological agency is something that is merely crucial for the appearance of your adult body, with such a thing having no immediate relevance to you once you have reached adulthood? Not at all. It seems that it is absolutely necessary to postulate continuous biological agency not just to explain the appearance of an adult human, but also the continuation of such a human. One reason for such a conclusion is that continuous biological agency is necessary to explain the continuous marvel of protein folding, something which all of our lives continually depend on. 

In their DNA humans have roughly 20,000 genes that specify that amino acid sequences of particular types of proteins. There are more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body.  An extremely important point that every person should very carefully ponder is that each type of functional protein molecule requires its own  specific three-dimensional shape, and there is no reason to believe that such 3D shapes are specified in DNA. DNA merely specifies the amino acid sequence of a protein (resembling a necklace of beads, with each bead being an amino acid), not the 3D shape of a protein. 

There is a dogma held by many biologists called Anfinsen's Dogma, which is the belief that the 3D shape of a protein molecule is determined solely by its amino acid sequence.  The idea (also called the "thermodynamic hypothesis") is that protein molecules reach their characteristic 3D shapes because in such shapes they have a minimum of "free energy." I explain quite a few reasons for rejecting this dogma in my post "Biologists Understand Neither the Origin Nor the Continuation of Any Adult Body." In 1969 scientist Cyrus Levinthal calculated that a protein with about 100 amino acids could be folded into about 3 to the 198^th power shapes. If a protein molecule were to try so many shape permutations looking for and finding some state in which "the free energy of the state is lowest," it would have to explore so many possibilities that  it would take very many years – eons actually. But instead a particular protein will very rapidly form into a characteristic three-dimensional shape, in a very short time – seconds for small proteins, and minutes for large proteins. So it never made any sense to think that protein molecules reached their 3D shapes because they were finding some ridiculously hard-to-find  state of minimum free energy. This discrepancy between the calculated ridiculously long time protein folding should take (under a "thermodynamic hypothesis" such as Anfinsen postulated) and the actual very short time it does take is known as Levinthal's paradox.

In fact, protein folding is a gigantic unsolved problem in biology.  There has been progress in something else (called protein structure prediction) by using artificial intelligence software such as AlphaFold2, and gigantic "deep learning" databases that use data from analyzing very many thousands or millions of proteins in different species. Such progress does nothing to explain how protein folding occurs in human bodies, which lack anything like such software and such "deep learning " databases.  Scientists currently have no credible explanation for how protein folding occurs. Protein folding is a continuous wonder of biological organization that your existence very much depends on. Very many of the types of proteins in your body have short lifetimes of only weeks or months. Were it not for the continual occurrence of protein folding in your body, you would die within months or weeks. 

It would seem, then, that continuous biological agency or GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force) is necessary not just for the origination of an adult human body from a speck-sized zygote, but also for the continuation of an adult human body, its lifetime of years or decades.  We are all radically dependent upon some unfathomable biological agency that is a top-down effect.  Neither our physical origination nor our physical continuation can be explained by any bottom-up analysis merely involving mechanistic or molecular effects.  

The conclusion that biological effects occur through the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force is consistent with the fossil record, which shows all or almost all of the currently existing dozens of animal phyla (the main division of animals) appearing in the same rather brief geological period called the Cambrian Explosion, occurring about 540 million years ago. This is the opposite of what we should expect under Darwinism.  Darwinist theorists have never credibly explained the Cambrian Explosion, and they also fail to explain numerous other cases where the fossil record suggests the sudden appearance of dramatic new biological innovations, without intermediate fossils suggesting a gradual path of appearance of such biological innovations.  Do not be fooled on this matter by the statements of ideology-motivated paleontologists, who have a long history of severe pareidolia and biased analysis in their interpretations of fossils. Also treat with proper critical scrutiny claims about fossils, claims that are often socially constructed claims about structures that were adhesively constructed by paleontologists or their helpers and dubiously claimed to be the remnant of a single organism (often when there is great doubt about such a claim). 

Teleology and purpose are such fundamental aspects of nature that denying them is every bit as foolish as advancing some theory of physics that denies the existence of width or depth. Believing in the progression of the universe from the seemingly infinite heat and density of a mathematical point to a state in which there is a planet as richly populated with life as planet Earth, and acknowledging the dependency of our universe on a long series of fine-tuned fundamental constants and laws, and being aware of the progression of each human from the speck-sized simplicity of a zygote to the enormously organized state of a human body with more than 20,000 types of functionally folded protein molecules (each an arrangement of parts as unlikely to appear by chance as a full page of purposeful and well-spelled text), as well as roughly 200 types of cells (each resembling a factory in its complexity), the scientist who denies teleology and denies that nature is purposeful is like some sailor in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean who denies the existence of water, or like someone living in a log cabin in the middle of a dense forest who denies the existence of trees. When nature is screaming to us in so many different ways that it is a product of purposeful intention, the most reasonable philosophical approach is to recognize such a reality. 

The Second Conclusion of Teleospiritism: Mind and Memory Are Spirit Realities

The second conclusion of teleospiritism is that mind and memory are spirit realities. What this means is that the human mind cannot be  either the product of the brain or equivalent to the brain, and that the brain cannot be any storage place of human memories. Instead of believing that mind and memory are bottom-up effects bubbling up from the chemical and electrical activity of neurons, we must believe that mind and memory are top-down effects, coming from some great reality beyond the human body.  We are not brains, but what can be called souls or spirits. Each of us did not get our soul or spirit from our brain or from our parents, but from some mysterious and ineffable causal reality that exists outside of our bodies. 

The table below summarizes some of the reasons for concluding that mind and memory must be spirit realities:

Human Mental Capability or Mental Characteristic or Mental Phenomenon	Why It Cannot Be Explained as a Brain Effect or Explained Under a “Brains Create Minds” Assumption
Humans have a unified sense of self, which usually persists with great constancy throughout a human's life.	There is no reason why the fluctuating stream of neuron electrical activity or chemical activity (billions of little microscopic events every second) should ever give rise to a unified sense of self.
Humans can instantly form new long-term memories after a single exposure to sensory phenomena (as you can see by the fact that you will have a good chance of remembering the plot of some movie you saw only once).	There is no theory of memory storage that properly accounts for the instant creation of new memories. Prevailing ideas such as “synapse strengthening” describe a process that would never work instantaneously, and would require at least many minutes for the formation of a new memory.
After hearing a single word or seeing a single image, humans can instantly remember something they learned very long ago.	Instant recall is totally inexplicable under the idea of a brain storage of memories. From human work in constructing computers that can instantly retrieve information, humans know the kind of things a brain would need to have to be capable of instant recall: things such as indexes or a coordinate system or a position notation system. The brain has no such things. The very strong slowing factor of synaptic delays should make instant recall of a brain-stored memory impossible.
Humans can remember very well things they learned 50 or more years ago, and they can remember very well things that they experienced 50 or more years ago.	The preservation of memories for more than a few weeks is inexplicable under the idea of a brain storage of memories. The proteins that make up synapses (claimed to be a storage place of memories) have an average lifetime of less than two weeks. There is no place in the brain that is a credible site for the storage of memories lasting decades.
Humans can form new abstract ideas.	Nothing that we know about the brain can explain the phenomenon of abstract idea creation.
Humans can form memories of very diverse types: episodic memories, sensory memories, emotional memories, physical skill memories, and memories of learned information of many different types (verbal, visual, musical, algorithmic,  historical and conceptual).	No one has ever found any credible evidence of memory information in brain tissue; we cannot read any memories from dead people;  and no one has any credible theory of how episodic memories or information learned in school could be translated into neural states or synapse states. Neither in the genome nor in the brain is there any sign of any neural code by which memories could be  translated into neural states or synapse states; but if there was such a code, it would have a massive "footprint" that would have resulted in its detection decades ago.
A human can fall deeply in love with another human, and stay in love with that person for years; or a human may develop some bitter hatred that persists for many years.	Being subject to such high levels of rapid molecular turnover and rapid structural remodeling on the low levels of synapse proteins and dendritic spines, a brain has no characteristics that would explain stable, long-lasting emotions persisting for many years.
Humans are capable of extremely deep philosophical thinking and very complex mathematical thinking.	Nothing in a brain can explain such a thing, nor is there any kind of “natural selection” reason why humans would have such capabilities, which do nothing to improve human survival.
Very many humans (as many as 10% to 25% or more) have  out-of-body experiences in which they have kind of floated out of their bodies, and seen their own bodies from a position above their bodies.	This phenomenon is completely inexplicable under claims that your brain is the source of your mind, and the phenomenon directly contradicts such claims, strongly suggesting they are false.
Humans can form beliefs that persist for decades.	There is no understanding of how a brain could cause the formation of long-lasting beliefs, nor is there any evidence that beliefs can be  changed by any surgery on brains or by taking drugs that modify the chemistry of brains. For example, there is no pill or surgery that will cause you to switch from being a Christian to being an agnostic, or cause you to switch from Republican political beliefs to some other political views.
Some "math savant" humans with "hypercalculia" (such as Zerah Colburn and Jacques Inaudi) can or could do very complex and accurate math calculations "in their heads" at extremely high speeds.	The unreliability of synaptic transmission (in which there is only a 50% or smaller chance of a signal crossing a synapse) should prevent very accurate and complex mental calculation if it was performed in your brain. While some signals (such as pain signals and sensory signals) can travel at fast speeds, synaptic delays should mean that the average brain signal moves too slowly to allow for very fast thinking.
Human memories and acquired knowledge are often well preserved after half of a brain is surgically removed in hemispherectomy operations to stop very frequent epileptic seizures.	This result is very much inconsistent with claims that memories are stored in the brain.
Humans can recall with 100% accuracy very large bodies of memorized information, such as when Hamlet actors or Wagnerian tenors recall perfectly all words of their very lengthy roles, or when Islamic scholars recall every word of their holy book.	A variety of very severe sources of signal noise in the brain (discussed here and here) should prevent any such thing from happening if memories are brain stored.
As discussed here, here, here, here and here, we have two hundred years of accounts of people (particularly hypnotized subjects or subjects in a trance) who displayed clairvoyance, often being able to accurately describe places they had never visited or heard about.	This phenomenon is completely inexplicable under the hypothesis that the brain is the source of the human mind.
There are hundreds of cases of normal people who saw an apparition of someone who died, and then later learned the person had died at the same time of the apparition sighting.	Such a reality is not explained by any theory that brains create our minds, and is not credibly explained by any theory of hallucination, as each case would require a fantastically improbable coincidence.
There are many cases of the same apparition being seen by multiple witnesses at the same time.	Such a reality is not explained by any theory that brains create our minds, and is not credibly explained by any theory of hallucination, as each such case would require a fantastically improbable coincidence.
Some humans who have lost the great majority of their brains because of diseases such as hydrocephalus have average or above-average intelligence, as documented by Lorber.	This reality is completely inexplicable under current assumptions that the mind is merely the product of the brain.
When the corpus callosum (the band of nerve fibers connecting the two brain hemispheres) is severed,  this does not result in split-personality persons with two selves. There still remains a single unified self.	This result is the exact opposite of what we would expect from the idea that the brain makes the mind.
Some rare humans such as autistic savants have displayed powers of memory many times greater than an average human, such as Kim Peek who knew very well the contents of 10,000 + books he had read, savants who can play back perfectly any song they hear, a person such as Stephen Wiltshire who can make accurate drawings of skylines he has seen only once,  and those with hyperthymesia who can remember almost every day of their adult life.	Such effects are inexplicable under the "brains make minds" idea, since the people displaying such abilities do not have larger brains, and sometimes have severely damaged brains.

The idea that both life and mind are top-down effects arising from some mysterious external reality is necessary because of the many severe failures of bottom-up explanations.  But such an idea may seem unthinkable merely because we have been "bottom-up brainwashed" all our lives to believe that life and mind must be bottom-up effects with a merely molecular explanation. To gain some insight on how we have been conditioned to favor a bad type of explanation, let us consider a hypothetical planet rather different from our own: a planet in which the atmosphere is much thicker, and always filled with clouds that block the sun. 

Let's give a name to this perpetually cloudy planet in another solar system, and call this imaginary entity planet Evercloudy.  Let's imagine that the clouds are so thick on planet Evercloudy that its inhabitants have never seen their sun.  The scientists on this planet might ponder two basic questions:

(1) What causes daylight on planet Evercloudy?
(2) How is it that planet Evercloudy stays warm enough for life to exist?

Having no knowledge of their sun, the top-down explanation for these phenomena, the scientists would probably come up with very wrong answers. They would probably speculate that daylight and planetary warmth are bottom-up effects.  They might spin all kinds of speculations such as hypothesizing that daylight comes from photon emissions from rocks and dirt, and that their planet was warm because of heat bubbling up from the hot center of their planet.  By issuing such unjustified speculations, such scientists would be like the scientists on our planet who wrongly think that life and mind can be explained as bottom-up effects bubbling up from molecules. 

Facts on planet Evercloudy would present very strong reasons for rejecting such attempts to explain daylight and warm temperatures on planet Evercloudy as bottom-up effects. For one thing, there would be the fact of nightfall, which could not easily be reconciled with any such explanations. Then there would be the fact that the dirt and rocks at the feet below the scientists of Evercloudy would be cold, not warm as would be true if such a bottom-up theory of daylight and planetary warmth were correct.  But we can easily believe that the scientists on planet Evercloudy would just ignore such facts, just as scientists on our planet ignore a huge number of facts arguing against their claims of a bottom-up explanation for life and mind (facts such as the fact that people can be just as smart and still maintain their memories when you remove half of their brains in hemispherectomy operations, the fact that the proteins in synapses have very short lifetimes, the fact that people who lost the great majority of their brains due to disease can be above average intelligence, and the fact that the human body contains no blueprint or recipe for making a human, DNA being no such thing). 

Just as the phenomena of daylight and planetary warmth on planet Evercloudy could never credibly be explained as bottom-up effects, but could only be credibly explained as effects coming from some mysterious unseen reality unknown to the scientists of planet Evercloudy who had never seen their sun, the phenomena of life and mind on planet Earth can never be credibly explained as bottom-up effects coming from mere molecules, but can be credibly explained as top-down effects coming from some mysterious unknown reality we cannot currently fathom. You cannot make such an explanation work by employing half-measures such as merely postulating some long-ago-design involved in biology. You must instead go "all in" by teaching a doctrine of GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force) or continuous biological agency such as taught by the philosophy of teleospiritism. 

An easy-to-remember rhyming mnemonic that can help you to remember the two main conclusions of teleospiritism is the mnemonic "GOAL and Soul," with GOAL being an acronym standing for the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force, and the word "Soul" referring to the conclusion that mind and memory are spirit realities, not brain effects. 

The Personal and Moral Implications of Teleospiritism

This has been a long and grand philosophical discussion, mostly focused on nature, biology and mind.  A person may ask: what relevance would this have to me, if it were true? What relevance would it have to how I should behave? Let's look at the personal and moral effects that might occur for someone adopting the philosophy I have proposed. 

An effect of large personal importance is that the person adopting teleospiritism and studying the evidence for it will have a strong tendency to believe in life after death. Teleospiritism asserts that mind and memory are spirit realities, not effects of the human brain. The person believing that his mind and memory is a spirit reality will not tend to think that his mind will end (or that his memories will be lost) at the time of death. He will tend to believe that his self and identity will persist after the death of the body. Indeed, a careful study of the things I have mentioned while discussing the Sixth Main Clue About Reality (that of Psychical and Paranormal Phenomena) will give you very many reasons for believing that the human spirit or soul survives death. 

Given his beliefs, a materialist will tend to be a person terrified of death. Given his philosophical outlook, a teleospiritist will tend to be a person not afraid of death, as long as he or she had led a good life. 

Being a philosophy and not a religion, teleospiritism cannot involve any exact description of life after death. But teleospiritism does nothing to exclude the idea that a person might have to suffer consequences or penalties for evil conduct he performed during his earthly life.  A teleospiritist will tend to be someone thinking that he should act morally, suspecting that there may be afterlife consequences for acting very immorally. 

Rejecting the main explanatory boasts of Darwinism, and regarding all human beings as being the products of some unfathomable causal agency involving superhuman intelligence, a teleospiritist will tend to reject some of the morality-poisoning ideas at the heart of Darwinism, such as the foolish idea that biological life is primarily a "struggle for existence" in which "survival of the fittest" is the key principle. Such ideas at the heart of Darwinism gave a "green light" to the horrible abuses that led to the building of the British Empire reaching its high point around 1900, the even more horrible misdeeds of Hitler's regime, and the gigantically horrible misdeeds of communist regimes. Countless tens of millions were senselessly slaughtered under Nazi and communist regimes, with the leaders of such regimes justifying their crimes under a Darwin-inspired ideology of a "struggle for existence" or "survival of the fittest." A teleospiritist will tend to think that a ruthless "struggle for existence" or "survival of the fittest" is neither a good explanation for how nature got its wonders nor a good guide as to how humans should act. Instead the teleospiritist will be a careful student of the gigantic levels of harmony, coordination and cooperation within nature and within the bodies of organisms such as humans.  If he or she takes such a reality as a guide, the principle to emulate will be "cooperate and work to achieve harmony, organization and coordination," rather than some savage principle of "make war and let the fittest survive." 

Darwin stated explicitly racist ideas in his "Descent of Man" book, and the full title of his "Origin of Species" book included the racist-sounding phrase "the preservation of favoured races." But racism is incompatible with a philosophy such as teleospiritism. The teleospiritist will tend to regard each human being as physically and mentally the product of unfathomable teleological agency, as something that might well be roughly described as a child of God. Such an attitude will tend to promote moral behavior. The teleospiritist will tend to regard skin color as a trivial feature of a human being, whose main aspects are a gigantically organized arrangement of bodily matter and a soul or spirit that is the reality behind mind and memory.  Such an attitude is incompatible with racism, which typically involves a silly focus on unimportant superficial features such as skin color.  

Teleospiritism and Ideologies That Preceded It

Let us briefly examine some ideologies that preceded teleospiritism, asking in each case, "Is such an ideology incompatible with teleospiritism or could one hold such an ideology while also being a teleospiritist?"

• Teleospiritism is incompatible with materialism, the claim that only matter or mass-energy exists. Teleospiritism maintains that human minds are a spiritual reality, negating materialism. 
• Teleospiritism is incompatible with physicalism, the claim that only the physical exists. Teleospiritism maintains that human minds are a spiritual reality, negating physicalism.
• Teleospiritism is incompatible with atheism, the claim that no deity or divine reality exists. Teleospiritism maintains that our fine-tuned universe exists as the purposeful product of some vast intelligence that is either a deity or some comparable type of divine reality. 
• Because teleospiritism maintains that the human mind and human memory are spiritual realities that presumably will naturally survive death, teleospiritism would seem to be inconsistent with forms of Christianity maintaining that life after death will only occur by some miraculous physical resurrection of the bodies of the dead. But teleospiritism would seem to be compatible with forms of Christianity holding the alternate idea that each human has an immortal soul that survives death. As for claims about some special status of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or scriptures, or claims of miracles occurring many centuries ago, such claims are outside of the philosophical scope of teleospiritism, and would seem to be neither excluded nor implied by teleospiritism. 
• Because teleospiritism maintains that the human mind and human memory are spiritual realities that presumably will naturally survive death, teleospiritism would seem to be inconsistent with forms of Islam maintaining that life after death will only occur by some miraculous physical resurrection of the bodies of the dead. But teleospiritism would seem to be compatible with forms of Islam holding the alternate idea that each human has an immortal soul that survives death. As for claims about some special status of Muhammad or the Quran, such claims are outside of the philosophical scope of teleospiritism, and would seem to be neither excluded nor implied by teleospiritism. 
• Teleospiritism does not explicitly imply but is compatible with both dualism (the idea that mind and matter are separate realities) and idealism (the belief that only mind exists).  You can be a dualist and a teleospiritist without contradiction, and you can be an idealist and a teleospiritist without contradiction. By idealism I refer to philosophical systems such as the one advanced by George Berkeley in his work "A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge."  In that work Berkeley advanced a philosophical theory in which all reality is mental, and human perceptual regularities occur partially because of a divine foundation that guarantees such regularities.  Such a philosophical theory can be maintained simultaneously with teleospiritism. Explaining how the two could co-exist would require a separate essay or blog post. 
• Teleospiritism is incompatible with Darwinism, which is not science (defined in the strictest sense as facts established by observation) but merely a theory popular with science professors. Teleospiritism rejects the claim of Darwinists that blind natural forces are adequate explanations for the main wonders of biology, insisting that the more impressive wonders of biology must be the result of a continuous biological agency or GOAL (the Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force) involving purposeful will and some awe-inspiring insight and mental power that are vastly different from blind natural forces.
• Teleospiritism is incompatible with the slight and silly notion of panpsychism, the idea that we can explain human consciousness by imagining that all matter has some "consciousness property." Panpsychism does virtually nothing to credibly address the Six Main Clues About Reality brought up by teleospiritism.  
• Teleospiritism is compatible with either spiritualism (centered around the idea that communication with the deceased is possible) or spiritism (a system of thought including a belief in repeated reincarnation), but does not require either a belief in the possibility of communication with the dead or a belief in reincarnation.  
• Teleospiritism is compatible with either a belief that the universe is 13 billion years old as estimated by scientists, or any belief that the universe is much younger than such an age. A very important point commonly overlooked is that because a created universe could presumably be created in any state of complexity or organization, we cannot have confidence in any estimate of the age of the universe once we have started to suspect that it was created. This point is explained in my post "If the Universe Was Created, Or if Everything Is Mental, Then We Do Not Know How Old the Universe Is." For example, the universe could have been created 2500 years ago or 500 years ago in some state of great organization suggesting a much older age. There is no valid rule that honest agents will never make things that may look older than they are. For example, if I win the lottery and arrange for a new Colonial-style house to be built in the New England region of the US, that does not make me a deceiver by building a house that some may guess is about 200 years old.     

The Very Limited Short-Term Prospects of Philosophies Such as Teleospiritism 

I think the philosophy I have proposed here is a wise one, but I do not have grand hopes that such a philosophy will gain many adherents during my lifetime or anytime soon. There are several factors that lead me to be pessimistic about the short-term prospects of any such  philosophy gaining any great momentum any time soon. These factors include the following:

(1) Although very simple claims such as rumors can "go viral" and spread very rapidly with the help of social media, complex new ideas tend to spread slowly. 

(2) We have within academia many well-funded sect-like groups led by a kind of professorial priesthood dedicated to the propagation of atheistic ideas opposed to the claims of any philosophy such as teleospiritism.  Such groups are allied with a large group of ruthless online oppressors who act as enforcers of the dogmas of such academia groups. Such groups have a long history of using deception, intimidation and character assassination to further their ideological goals. 

(3) There is a large, well-funded and highly dysfunctional community of neuroscientist researchers who are interested in promoting their belief dogmas that brains produce minds and that brains store memories, and who for many years have been following extremely bad research practices that lead them to make false alarm claims of having produced evidence for their belief dogmas.  The poor research practices leading to such claims include practices such as habitually using way-too-small study group sizes, a failure to follow proper blinding protocols, a failure to pre-register a research hypothesis that will be tested, the use of inaccurate and subjective judgments of fear in animals rather than reliable techniques such as heart rate measurement, and the use of misleading visuals when presenting brain scan data. 

(4) The talking points and boasts of such groups tend to be uncritically parroted by a large group of credulous writers who call themselves "science journalists," but who so often fail to act like good journalists and pass off dogma, poorly designed research and speculation as "science news." 

(5) There is nowadays a very large economic complex that I have called the academia-cyberspace profit complex, one that revolves around promoting unproven "science news" claims, for a variety of economic reasons including the generation of web page views that produce advertising revenue, the promotion of scientific papers for the increase of citation counts that serve as a metric of success for scientists, the satisfaction of story quotas and page view quotas for science writers, the maintaining of high stock valuations for pharmaceutical corporations, and the justification of high tuition charges at colleges. This large economic infrastructure (which serves partially as a source of mass entertainment) will continue to promote misleading research claims that tend to conflict with the ideas of teleospiritism. 

(6) Wealth is extremely concentrated in the hands of people dedicated to teaching ideas they believe to be wise, but which are foolish. 

These are all reasons for being pessimistic about the near-term prospects of any philosophy such as teleospiritism. But there are some reasons for being rather hopeful about the prospects of philosophies such as teleospiritism in the very long run:

(1) Evidence that the universe had a sudden fine-tuned beginning is not ever going to go away. 

(2) Evidence of the vast organization and enormous fine-tuned functional complexity of biological organisms is never going to go away. To the contrary, such evidence will increase as time passes. 

(3) Despite all of the lies that have been told about DNA being a blueprint for making bodies, it generally holds true that you can only tell a gigantic lie for a certain number of years. We may hope that one day our scientists will start to realize just how utterly gigantic are the implications of the fact that humans do not have anywhere in their body any such thing as a specification for making a human body or any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. 

(4) The evidence for the enormous fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and laws is never going away, and such evidence will in all likelihood increase. 

(5) Despite the existence of a large and well-funded church-like neuroscientist belief community dedicated to promoting the incorrect dogma that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories, the physical shortfalls of brains ruling out such a dogma will continue to exist, and will become more apparent the more we learn about the brain.

(6) Despite the existence of a large and well-funded church-like scientist belief community dedicated to promoting materialist dogmas, humans will continue to have a wealth of paranormal and psychical experiences contradicting such dogmas, and the evidence that the human mind and human memory are spirit realities will continue to accumulate. 

So while the odds against any philosophy such as teleospiritism look steep in the short run, the prospects for a philosophy of this type look much brighter in the very long run. I myself am not concerned about the immediate popularity prospects of such a philosophy. When formulating or teaching a philosophy, your rule should be: better to be right and have most of the world against you than to be wrong and to have most of the world on your side.  

To read further information and analysis very relevant to the philosophy of teleospiritism, you can read the posts on my three blogs:

www.futureandcosmos.blogspot.com

www.headtruth.blogspot.com

www.orbpro.blogspot.com

To read additional information and analysis very relevant to the philosophy of teleospiritism, you can read my free books at www.archive.org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Mark+Mahin%22

Like all of the posts on my blogs, this document can be shared or republished by anyone, on the Internet or in print, using the Creative Commons Attribution  No-Derivatives license here, requiring attribution (including a link to this web page) and prohibiting derivatives. 

Now I have finished walking the long hazardous path I mentioned in my first paragraph, where I compared such a trip to walking on a long icy path. Did I slip and fall to the ground? That is for the reader to judge.